I started to use Perl strictly for CGI, then once I got in to it, I started to do some elemetary programming with it.

Personally, I find, that for development and ease, I much prefer doing whatever I can in Perl. I'm a Pascal programmer from the Turbo Pascal 1.0 ( and even JPL Pascal - which was on 3 - 5 1/4" floppies and you had to swap floppies to compile the damn thing! ) and I find Perl is much easier to work with -- usually :)

As far as Perl for CGI, I find now I'm doing almost no CGI programming, but just Perl hacking.