What kinds of tasks do you need to use? If you give us more information on what you're doing, we can recommend more specific information.

Catalyst is a good choice for writing web applications in Perl -- no one should look at you askance for doing so. It has a learning curve, but it's powerful and flexible and can handle complex applications.

CGI is an execution model, though. It's a standard for how a web server can launch and interact with a program to generate an HTTP response.