My freshman year in high school, I convinced one of the teachers to let me take a self taught C course using a book I found at the library. After I went through the book, doing all the programming excercises at the end of each chapter, I had a month or two left before the semester was over, so I decided to check out this "Perl" language I'd heard was popular for web based stuff.

Got through the part of the Llama book during the class and finished the rest at home, but figured that it wasn't going to be that useful and that I'd have to continue learning C/C++ at some point.

Then, due to several work related projects, I started using Perl quite a bit and as a result learned a lot about the language. Later I read through the Camel book and began to love TMTOWTDI and DWIM (and yes, began to use strict and warnings).

I haven't been back to C since, because every time I think that I'll need to learn it, I'm able to do everything in Perl (and probably faster because of CPAN). I do still plan to learn C++ (hopefully this summer so I can place out of CS1 in college), but Perl has worked great for every project I've needed to do.