1) Tcl works fine for web development in AOLserver. It has its shortcomings, but all languages do. The plus is that it's been tuned to work with AOLserver.
Python is indeed elegant and you can use Python with AOLserver these days. I don't know how PyWX compares with just using Tcl performance-wise though.
PHP has problems with threading AFAIK.
2) This has come up many times. It would be too big of a task and the benefits would be minimal if any. Neither PHP or Tcl are in high demand in corporate environments, whereas Java is (but I don't want to develop web apps in Java personally).
PHP because of its speed? I don't know if PHP is faster than anything else. Besides, most PHP applications out there are for MySQL, which means they are worthless without some porting effort to a real database system.
