Related, somewhat, to an earlier post I made awhile back I have just read a series of posts by David Cross talking about (what he perceives is) the corporate attitude toward Perl.

I think there is some truth to what he says. I can't say that I think this is necessarily a wide spread opinion, but I do believe there are a lot of companies out there that are scared of Perl. He seems to be saying that the reason for this is because 10+ years ago lots of web development was being done with Perl and it was (often) done poorly. So now Perl is a victim of its own success. I imagine there is some truth to this. I've been developing in Perl professionally for over ten years now and I have seen lots of poor Perl (plenty of it written by me).

But I have one question. PHP has been around for quite some time now and has been a very popular choice for web developers over the last 8-10 years. Lots and lots of very bad PHP is being written every single day. By the logic of these two articles shouldn't PHP's popularity be on the wane instead of (apparently) on the uptick (as a partner with Java)? Or is it really all just marketing and PHP has better marketers?