http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=18661

Kozz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

...I've got a friend who runs the ISP where my company's domain is hosted, and where I do all my perl scripting.
He's much more versed in writing BASH scripts, and more recently PHP. However, he doesn't know alot about Perl, but insists that anything (Web/CGI-related) I can do with Perl, he can do better with PHP. He cites things like automatic form-variable creation and other features of PHP which make it so great for an embedded scripting tool. He also complains that my Perl scripts create an unnecessary load on his server (no mod_perl) which could be avoided or reduced if I used PHP instead. (Of course, there are actually *many* instances of many of my scripts running on this one server; my company has developed websites for many domains hosted on this same server, thus many use my perl scripts.)
Usually his complaints are precipitated by a single oopsie on my part, such as creating a nightmare-ish deep-recursion which temporarily brings the server to its knees for perhaps 20 seconds. I'm by no means a perfect programmer, of course.<BR.
So I have my faults, but that doesn't make PHP superior to Perl. What would you tell this person?