[thatwasunusual]

I was about to mention HTML::Mason, which was superior to many other templating solutions back then.

The biggest problem for Perl was that PHP was almost built for the web, while Perl was "just a normal programming language."

I wonder where Perl would have been if there had been a packaged and easy to install version of Apache with Perl, mod_perl, HTML::Mason etc. pre-installed in some way in late 90s.

[cutler]

Mod_perl was too much of a hosting liability for that to have been a possibility. You had to really watch your step with mod_perl not to expose shared memory to other processes running on the same server. Mod_perl is also much more complex than PHP or even Perl CGI. It was always considered senior Perl dev territory whereas PHP was aimed at the lower-tech DIY market.