Perl
Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language. It is very popular for web programming and it supports most web formats and databases.
Daniel K. Schneider believes that Perl is one of the most ugly scripting languages ever invented. On the other hand, Perl code quality is usually better than anything else (in particular PHP), probably because people able to learn Perl are better programmers (or at least real programmers)...
CPAN
The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) includes most know Perl code. If your Perl installation is correctly configured, installing Perl modules is really easy (otherwise it's not).
Configuring CPAN
Open a shell:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
Type:
o conf init
Make sure Perl can find your C compiler (e.g. gcc), make, etc. !
Installing a module
If you are lucky, in a CPAN shell type:
install XXX:YYY
e.g.
install LWP::Simple