But it's not that property of PHP that he's jealous of. Quite the contrary: for most serious web developers, that's one of the things you really ought to avoid.

What he wants is the other properties of PHP, like easy application deployment: for example, just drop in an archive for a Perl web application and just have it work. And proper separation of applications, so that they don't ever interfere with each other: neither by accident, nor on purpose (not everybody is trustworthy).

Those are problems for which neither ePerl nor embperl offer a solution.