1. You can't ignore the fact that there are tonnes of good languages. Perl is indeed one of them. Otherwise, oneday, you'll use perl for the most inappropriate thing.

2. First to market doesn't always mean best. Altavista was great for a while. But now is google. 'sides, perl's regexp has been outwardly ported many many times.

3. Neither is particularly hard to do. Familiarity with any given language will bring speed.

4. The ruby and python api's are huge. php's are as well,i'll conceed, though i really don't like it. :) java is insanely huge.