When I first started doing web programming, I worked for an all-Microsoft (ASP, VB-Script) shop. I took a look at Cold-Fusion and eagerly anticipated "dynamic web pages with out programming".

So how do you loop? Well there's a LOOP (or whatever) tag. And conditional logic? There's IF ELSE END-IF (or whatever). In other words, programming constructs. But I found the tags far harder to deal with than VB-Script. I'm sure there are lot's of things I missed, and that have been added since, but I wasn't impressed.

I think it comes down to a need to do HTML and programming logic. If you do it all, you'll probably prefer Perl and CGI.pm. Or if you deal with designers for HTML you need a templating system (or prefer one in any case).

But the bottom line is that every web project worth working on involves programming logic, and I'd rather implement it in Perl (or VB-Script) than in someone's stupid, proprietary tags that are a poor substitute.