Short answer: Yes!

Long answer: I'm a hardware designer by trade and just picked up Perl programming a little over a year ago because this older dog needed to learn some new tricks. Currently, I'm analyzing very large textual data files that I used to use shell scripting, awk, and sed to parse and extract the data I needed. So most of of my programming is in the form of fancy scripts, I know it's a far cry from being a full-fledged program. However, I'm having a blast with Perl, wished I would have learned it years ago and I'm now curious to learn about other programming languages out there besides C/C++ like Ruby, Python, etc. I think it is a good entry language for some of the other languages mentioned by other posters.