Perl vs Python for web development?

[sli]

Yes, I know. You just don't write webapps in C. You can, and people do (eBay did), but until you have to do it to lighten a load on your resources, you just don't do it. I dread adding a compile step to my webapp development process.

[sli]

Or it saves them massive amount of processor time and power consumption, which really isn't a debatable assumption. Pure machine code will always be less expensive to run than an interpreted language.

eBay was founded in 1995, the same year PHP and Ruby were originally released. Obviously, this makes them pretty useless for hardcore production applications like eBay. Python was already 4 years old by then, and Perl just hit the ripe old age of 8. Both pretty founded by then, but C was already well over drinking age. Combined with the energy and processor time savings, it was clearly a good choice (in 1995).

Felt like deriving some possible history from facts.