I'm not sure why people are still talking about this

Both are just unsuitable for the kind of stuff that, I'd guess, 99% of web development in the wild really is.

modperl in the right configuration is not supported anywhere I've ever seen. I have had problems even requesting trivial/required Perl changes from budget hosts. I can't imagine one that would setup modperl for less than a hundred or two a month.

fastcgi is unsuitable because developing live would involve: 1) Make a change, 2) Watch your server stop working for 2-5 minutes because it had a syntax error and that's how it's configured, 3) Try this for two hours until you *curse* the names of perl and fastcgi, 4) Try PHP, see results instantly, never look back.

fastcgi b) do your development at home on a dev box, not live, like you should. Now you're back to having to be a sysadmin/webmaster to setup your server(s) and environment. You're a professional again and not a normal user who reaches for PHP.

I'm on your side. modperl is great, fastcgi + perl is great, and I would *love* Perl to take the web back at the entry level but PHP fills this niche better so far. This is why I was initially excited about the modperlite stuff but without at least persistent DB connections, it still probably loses to PHP.