...to this day, I still can't wrap my head on how PHP even got to exist in a world where Perl was already filling the web niche just fine. Also, if they wouldn't have made it too-weird-for-math-and-physics people, Perl would've probably filled Python's niche too. And with that kind of resources focused on it, Perl 6 could've actually turned up into a clean nice new language that would've unified us all by also suppor…
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r\n";
print "";
print "Hello world";
print "";
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI;
my $q = CGI->new;
print $q->header('text/html');
print $q->start_html();
print "Hello world";
print $q->end_html();
In other words, there was no standard templating; Template Toolkit eventually became a relatively defacto standard, but PHP had already won - and even then, TT had to be manually invoked rather than just going and freestyling tags everywhere in your HTML and "it just working".
In every other respect Perl is & was superior to PHP, and it's really sad to see Perl fade, despite (or because of?) its crazy flexibility and power.