many hosts don't actually run PHP in-process
mod_php is far more common in my experience than anything else.
which PHP happily obliges with its fopen wrappers allow_url_fopen = 0
As an example I just googled "hostgator perl" and theres a page on how to set it up on their shared plan. There's nothing here.
I'm not saying there's no hosts out there that let you run CGI, but you're far more likely to get PHP support than anything else. Rather, try to find a host that has CGI but not PHP...
Are you lumping Lua and Lisp's parseability with Perl as a reason to choose PHP?
Are you illiterate? Did you just skip over this point, which is what the issue I'm referring to is about? "Perl was designed as a "glue language" which is why these things are easy to do, and hard to manage when you don't want your users using them."
How is it a fail that a language expresses a philosophy, actually follows it, and actually succeeds in its objective?
It has succeeded if its objective is to be as perverse as possible. Recursion via a function call is NOT the same as a loop, because that's not how real machines work. Just because some theorist with his head in the clouds (and possibly high on something) showed how they are in theory doesn't mean it's true in practice.