in reply to Another prediction of Perl's demise
You gotta love the depth of knowledge displayed by some people.
CGI aka The Common Gateway Interface is a set of rules that describe how a Web Server communicates with another piece of software on the same machine, and how the other piece of software (the 'CGI program') talks to the web server. Any piece of software can be a CGI program if it handles input and output according to the CGI standard, and that software can be written in a wide range of languages. In a web context PHP is just as dependent on CGI as Perl. You can directly hack on the Apache C api with Perl, Python, PHP, etc which bypasses the CGI interface in favour of another interface. Unlike PHP however, Perl sees broad application outside of a simple web context.
Within a web context there is no doubt that PHP is increasingly popular and if the web is where you want to work it would be wise to become familiar with PHP, Javascript, and Java as well as what I presume is a core of Perl, Apache, HTML and SQL.
cheers
tachyon