On my early years in high school, our teachers taught us to code, and got us hook with programming development with robots and graphs. We started with Java, we hated that first semester, but the end of such was rewarding seeing all the skills we had gathered were used on robots. The Lego Mindstorms with Java handle were the deal in that last weeks of that course. In our second semester, we saw Perl mixed with graphics, and as we keep progressing the interest for strings/text handle became something to care for. In the middle of that semester our teacher introduces us to CPAN and Perl modules. Since the course was intended for an introduction to OOP, it was perfect. After that, most of the alumni went to other fields, I moved to web development and sysadmin, but I've read from some who even use Perl for their taxes.