I have learned first programming at school with Pascal (and that seems to be common in germany) and although i learned Perl faster apart from school and i think Pascal is terribly ugly, it is a good language to learn the basics. You have to be explicit, you have to predeclare things, you see all stuff that happens. I think Perl is possible to learn as first language (and it's likely to be the last language then :), but you risk to learn a lot of Bad Things that Perl allows you (and beginners often don't see why they should tell perl to restrict them) and nasty Pascal would just not know. Learning Perl after such a scientific language helps you to start and you automatically avoid some mistakes.

But the language you learn is only the one thing, it's also important how you learn it and how busy you are. There are a lot of those "Script Kiddies" around that have learned Perl (and more often their tool is PHP) from bad online tutorials or bad books or even worse scripts and do not know a bit of the CS background and don't want to know and think it's not necessary. I think it's most important.

btw.: Learning Perl as a First (programming) language