As an earlier poster mentioned, Perl is not only used for CGI and mod_perl. In the last few months, I have used it to write a great installation script, a test script to try out web caching, and a cron job that watches for new documents to be added to a database table (submitted by a PHP front end) and calls another script to submit the new documents to a document processing engine.

There's some web-related stuff in there, but none of it is CGI stuff. And the PHP front end that I mentioned? Written by a marketing guy who can muddle through using PHP but really isn't up to coding a CGI in Perl. That's OK -- PHP has its place, just like any other tool in the developer's toolbox.

And I guess that's my point -- Perl is a multi-function tool. It was used for systems administration tasks for years before the web came along and clever folks figured it out that it could be used to do CGI programming. I picked up Perl as a useful tool five and a half years ago and still feel amazed and very lucky that I continue to find work developing in Perl.

I'm not that big on cool -- I prefer something that works. I'm not into the Tool of the Month club. Enterprise Java Beans sounds like a cool thing to have on your resume, but I'm confident that I can use Perl (with CPAN's riches) to solve lots of different problems. And if folks don't think it's cool, that's fine. I'll just do my job and go home at the end of the day and drink beer.