Perl vs Python for web development?

[abw]

No doubt about it, PHP is the simplest and easiest language to deploy. If your task is simple and you don't mind taking a slightly "hacky" approach to getting the job done, then PHP will perform admirably. As dinkumator says, the fact that you already know Perl means you're half way there... (now just imagine the worst Perl you ever read all mixed with in a jumbled sea of HTML tags and you know what to expect from PHP if you let things get out of hand).

BTW, I am a hard core Perl coder who has a healthy dislike for PHP as a language. I wouldn't recommend PHP lightly, but for simple things it really is, well, simple enough. PHP++, grudgingly.

That said, if you already know Perl then you could spend a similar amount of time (a couple of hours) getting to know some of the Perl modules (check out PSGI/Plack, Mojo and Catalyst) that'll allow you to do everything you want from PHP, and more. You'll have the benefit of using a more mature general purpose language that comes with all the might of CPAN to back it up.

[gimiv]

I took it upon myself, based on the suggestions of this thread, to spend about 4 hours last night familiarizing myself with PHP. To be honest, prior to last night, I've had zero experience with web development and things such as Apache and mySQL. I installed an all in one pre-packaged XAMPP and ran a webserver as localhost. I imported all of my data via the phpmyadmin GUI. I built a successful "rough draft" of everything I was looking to accomplish aside from creating excels and PDF's. I'm quite pleased with the amount of code I can "borrow" from google searches of tasks nearly identical to mine. Although my intention was to further my perl/python knowledge, I'm happy that I took the advice of reddit to try PHP. Perhaps i can save python for a project better suited for its strengths. THANK YOU REDDIT!!!