In a nutshell keep in mind that every language has it's purpose (maybe even COBAL). While you can do a lot in a few lines of Perl, it's important to consider what exactly Perl is hiding and doing for you. Many lower level optimizations for C++ also work for Perl, but can easily be glossed over if you don't understand what's going on in the guts. -- Well if optimization is important to you anyway :) Keep in mind that learning an approach in one language, can teach you a lot about other languages too. Learning Lisp for instance, gives you a pretty good understanding of recursion fairly quick.