One thing Derek failed to mention that might be interesting to the HN set: we're using Catalyst, which is a Perl-based MVC framework. It's a little unorthodox, as the popular choices these days seem to be RoR and django.
We've been really happy with Catalyst, especially its Chained dispatch type. And CPAN has been really helpful since there's just the two of us working on this right now. :-)
Catalyst has an active mailing list and IRC channel full of helpful people. For more information, check out http://www.catalystframework.org/.
As the author of Catalyst::DispatchType::Chained, thanks!
I think most of us in the Cat community consider it a secret weapon - it's not optimised for simple, fast stuff like rails is and it's not optimised for content sites like Django is but it scales really nicely to large projects and CPAN helps keep them from getting too large in the first place.
Perl and python are very different languages. They're both good. You might find you're vastly more productive in python. I'm vastly more productive in Perl.
(declaration of bias: I'm a Catalyst core team member and would be delighted to see you on #catalyst on irc.perl.org :)
If you already know perl, then there's no reason not to use Catalyst. While it's lacking in the shiny marketing (build a blog in 5 minutes) that other frameworks seem to like, it's a good bit more flexible in terms of your choices of Models and Views, and in the way that you can present dispatch logic than other frameworks.
We've been really happy with Catalyst, especially its Chained dispatch type. And CPAN has been really helpful since there's just the two of us working on this right now. :-)
Catalyst has an active mailing list and IRC channel full of helpful people. For more information, check out http://www.catalystframework.org/.