For your situation here are some of the reasons I'd use to
push for perl.
- Perl has a well-defined DB interface layer, DBI. DBI is database
indepandant so if you ever decide to switch to another DB, you can do it with almost
no changes to your scripts.
- w/ apache, mod_perl and Apache::DBI you get cached DB handles,
so your scripts aren't constantly disconnecting and reconnecting to the DB server (which can really hurt performance)
- w/ apache and mod_perl (and optionally Apache::Registry, depending on how you want to do things) your scripts can run inside the web
server; this is much faster use no separate process has to be forked.
- Perl is generally better suited for CGI's because it has a well defined CGI variable parsing library.
- If you need to do some C stuff you can always use Inline to put C code inline in your Perl programs.
Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.