Newbie programmer here...

[MH]

I'm a novice programmer. I wrote my first program, a simple database, in 
BASIC a long time ago, and have used Visual Basic mostly since then. I have 
some experience with SQL, also.

I have recently been wrestling with PERL as a means to create interactive 
websites, but I find PERL incredibly inconsistent and confusing, and the 
debugging features I think are sorely lacking. I spend HUGE amounts of time 
solving very basic problems.

I am looking for ANYTHING but PERL to accomplish basic tasks such as 
collecting, processing, and displaying data via CGI/HTML. Is PYTHON a good 
candidate for this? What about PHP? Suggestions?