Perhaps I stand alone in this view, but I've always told my friends to learn another language like C/C++ before learning perl. I have a very simple reasoning behind this, once you learn to program, not script, in perl, you'll be so spoiled by its development time and ease of use, you probly won't want to program in another language. I also think that that extra hoops you have to jump through with something like C/C++ with data typing and memory allocation allow a novice programmer to inadvertantly become a more resource and speed aware programmer. There are also a bazillion books on learning all kinds of programming concepts and they all tend to use C/C++ or Java as their "sample" language. Novice programmers have yet to strip the meaning from the syntax so an indiscrepancy in what they're used to seeing, and something that an author is presenting, could nullify the meaningful prose surrounding the code.

People are also lazy, so if they learn something like perl where you can do crazy things like creating variables all over the place, they're far less likely to appreciate the use of strict and other perl programming pragmas that the people who use perl for programming not scripting accept. We might also be more prone to code like:

open( FILE, "<myfilecontainingagigofdata");
my @FILE = <FILE>;
close FILE;
[download]

Springing up all over the monastary and see all kinds of posts about "My perl is broken, I always get out of memory errors". Anywys, that's just my caffeine deprived rambling for the morning.

-brad..