[whiskeyjack]

I hate PHP with a passion but I think it's worth knowing about and I think the claim that "knowing C" makes it easy to interpret a PHP program is not a good assessment. Further, just knowning C doesn't mean you'll know the semantics of webdev... which is what PHP is all about. You get domain knowledge along with the language.

I'm also convinced that in almost every case that Ruby and Python are just fine in place of Perl... except for text processing.

Perl's regexp engine is top notch and is an extremely key part of the language in ways it just isn't in Python or Ruby, especially after the release of Perl 5.10. I don't see another language that can touch Perl there yet (feel free to correct me because I'd be interested to learn).