Well, they kind of have a point, but Perl is certainly a fine *first* language. The more languages you know, the stronger your skills will be in all of them. Having a C background, in particular, will make you a better perl programmer. C is more "low-level" and forces you to worry about things (e.g. pointers and memory allocation) that perl takes care of "behind the scenes." Once you have learned about such things, you gain a greater appreciation for all that perl really does, and how it makes it look easy while doing so :). Perl is great because you can make it as simple or as complex as you want. You can write good, working programs with a few simple keywords and concepts, yet you can still dive in deeper and deeper by eventually learning about modules, references, typeglobs, embedding perl in C (and C in perl), and eventually reading perlguts for pleasure and checking out the regex engine. :)