Server-Side Web Languages

[posure]

Hi, I'm posting this poll as research for a project I am doing on server-side web languages. Please take the time to vote. If you have time please take time to respond to the following survey as well, thank you.

Thank you for reading through this survey. It will only take a few minutes to fill out, depending on how detailed your responses are. This information will be used for and included in a research report on the benefits of individual web languages, as well as their weaknesses, cost, popularity, and difficulty.
By responding to this survey, you imply consent for your response to be used in this research report.

Question #1: What is your favorite server-side web language to use?

Question #2: Why are the benefits and weaknesses does this language have?

Question #3: What do you feel are the best applications of this language?

Question #4: What are some other web languages you like to use?

Question #5: What are the benefits and weaknesses of those languages?

Question #6: What other languages are you interested in and why?

Thank you for taking your time to respond to this survey.

[Rick Bull]

I like PHP (although I haven't tried most of the others, only Perl). It's free and cross-platform, and it can really do a lot. I also found it a lot easier than Perl, although Perl is probably better at working with strings and such. It's very well documented too. I'm not much of a server-side person, so I can't really put much more than that in :D

[oujasper]

While it is true that PHP is free, the development time is so much longer than with ColdFusion that I can more than pay for the CF server software with the increased productivity I have using CF - especially on larger projects. I have nothing against PHP. It's great and I use it frequently. You can usually find cheaper hosting for it, because most ISP's support it by default. But for larger projects where significant development time is required, I really like CF because the CFML tags do so much of the work for me, that I'd have to script in PHP. They're both great and are good tools.

[jeffmott]

What is your favorite server-side web language to use?
Perl
Why are the benefits and weaknesses does this language have?
Benefits: It can do everything all the others can do but more/better. Free, cross-platform, extensive documentation, and one of the largest collection of third-party modules. Some people for whatever reason only learn up to a beginners level of Perl, and therefore find it difficult to do some things. But in truth Perl can do what any other language can do (such as the main competitor PHP) just as easily, if not easier. Also, more servers support Perl/CGI than any other of the languages listed.

Weaknesses: none :)
What do you feel are the best applications of this language?
Perl is general purpose and can be applied to any situation.
What are some other web languages you like to use?
Havn't found a good reason to not use Perl yet. What people think of as the weaknesses of Perl are generally misconceptions.

Perl also has a special set of security checks that I don't believe exist in any other language currently. These same insecurities that are caught by Perl can exist just as easily in programs written in other languages, but those programmers have no way of being warned of their existence.