Perl unfortunately has a bad image vs its true reality. I think Perl / Python are interchangeable as a language choice for web scale projects. If your biggest

Perl unfortunately has a bad image vs its true reality. I think Perl / Python are interchangeable as a language choice for web scale projects. If your biggest problem is whether to use Python vs Perl vs X, then I say good luck to you -- you should really have more important problems to worry about. I'd never use ruby for a web scale project (as evidenced by the many services solely dedicated to scaling ruby on rails apps). PHP is not really a language. Maybe the future belongs to ECMAScript.