I believe perl is good language for many tasks, but sure not for all tasks.

I have also son, 10 years old now, and am also thinking about introduction to programming. But I was thinking about something different:

LOGO is excellent, because Jr. can have visual clue what is going on, and what might be wrong. Visual clue is rather important, at lest on the cognitive level of my son (he is reading sfi-fi Foundation series now)...

Also, it is simple to define subroutines in LOGO, to extent language where you want to. You can do a lot of things without even begin to worry about variables.

My another choice is some language for programming adventure games, to program simple game. I want to research it little more...

Yet another choice might be "Baltazar the Wizard" from Czech republic. My older son played with it a lot on DOS couple years ago (I just recalled this - no idea if it is still avalable). I was impressed how smart animations were pssible in it - with custom graphics.

I'll bookmark this node. Insight of fellow monks is sure much appreciated.

Update:

LOGO is language oriented to 'turtle graphic': To give comands to draw shapes. For your 'feeling' about Logo, here is how to define a procedure to draw a square:

TO SQR :SIDE REPEAT 4 [ FORWARD :SIDE RIGHT 90 ] END

Then, SQR 20 will draw square. You get the idea.

pmas

To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.