>Does Perl, Python or Ruby have built-in automatic escaping and sanitization?
No, of course not. That's very much the point. PHP's broken attempt at that created security holes.
>On top of that all three of those languages require additional setup
No they don't. It is just that someone else has already done the setup for you with PHP at most cheapo hosting companies. Installing python is no harder than installing PHP.
>(Especially Ruby with RoR shudder)
You are comparing a framework to a language. Rails is no harder to setup than any of the PHP frameworks like zend or symfony.
No, of course not. That's very much the point. PHP's broken attempt at that created security holes.
>On top of that all three of those languages require additional setup
No they don't. It is just that someone else has already done the setup for you with PHP at most cheapo hosting companies. Installing python is no harder than installing PHP.
>(Especially Ruby with RoR shudder)
You are comparing a framework to a language. Rails is no harder to setup than any of the PHP frameworks like zend or symfony.