Sometimes I regret the current situation where PHP has practically ruled in the area of decent speed scripting language in the Unix environment. Searching for a shared web host that provides mod_perl or FastCGI/mod_python or is probably a thousand to a million times harder than one that provides PHP. Those beasts are just not suited for shared environment (But then who says mod_php is?) So that leaves running Perl/Python applications as CGI.
I do programming in all three, but now I prefer Python more and more. Alas, most projects must still be done in PHP, though, because where would we get that many Python/Perl developer nowadays...
Btw, ckizer, is your school visitor Mr. Hammond, Mr. Lutz, or someone else? Did the guys from Yahoo impress you?