Perl was the "first" language I learned, and I never regretted it. Ok, I don't hack C/C++ programs, but in my believe, Perl is a very good language if you want to learn programming. (With the guiding light of the Llama book, of course.) The fact that Perl is "too forgiving" is a grace and not a burden IMHO. I even heard, that some say Perl could be the cure of many Buffer Overflow vulnerabilites, cause Perl handles everything itself, you don't have to predeclare things. The statement that Perl doesn't let you see what's going on behind the scenes may be right, but: if you have a hammer and punch that nail in, do you need to have a grade in Physics?