I find all kinds of useful stuff on this site [Proud Member since <3 months ag0], and I'm definitely a CGI hacker. But not necessarily in the widely-understood sense (ie, form->email gateways, polls, message boards, etc.)

I cut my eyeteeth working for a .com, developing a backoffice financial accounting application that just so happened to be web-delivered. But, in this CGI-application, I learned about MD5, DBI/ctlib, pipes, CPAN, UNIX, and all sorts of other "non-cgi" stuff.

I tell people that I write perl, and they ask about CGI scripts, and I say that I write CGI's, and get the "Oh I see, thanks for playing" kind of response. What I think people outside of the community fail to realize is all of the behind-the-scenes stuff that has to go on in order for robust, web-delivered applications to be written utilizing the CGI. The browser is an awesome GUI, primarily, IMHO, becuase it's a tool that so many people know how to use. Perl is a great server-side language for performing all sorts of things. Throw in Apache, Mod_perl, etc, etc, and the CGI is a virtually indispensable tool.

just my .02