Short version: Perl is too helpful to make a good intro language for career programmers. (Then again, so is pretty much any other language, from Java to Lisp.) Start with a sane assembly language, move to C, go from there.

Longer version: Re: Learning Perl as a First (programming) language

(Lest you think I'm some sort of Real Programmer type, or even a C evangelist, I try to avoid C for most purposes, and I think you should, too. Perl is usually good enough, and if it isn't, Lisp is usually better. I've applied too many patches and read too many BUGTRAQ advisories to advocate C for general systems programming. That said, sometimes you need low level system access, blazing speed, or both, and sometimes the only language bindings you have are to C... and if you haven't learned from the start to check buffer lengths and malloc's return values, well, I'll probably be reading about your software on BUGTRAQ.)

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F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
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The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!