I don't think I'd recommend Perl as a first language to anyone.

I'm almost convinced by the "say 'Hello world!'" argument, but I think that Perl has too many weird pitfalls for beginners. It makes Lisp and Scheme a lot more appealing, because the beginner learns a simple syntax in a short time, and that's all there is.

Perl as a first language might be best for someone who just wants to get a job done and has no aspirations to be a professional programmer. Such a user might be better off learning only Perl than learning something easier (and less powerful) before moving on to Perl. That is, it's hard to justify wasting time on HappyFunLanguage when you're going to need to learn something like Perl later anyway.

Someone on the path of a professional programmer should learn other languages first in order to learn the various paradigms that Perl supports without mandating (object orientation, functional programming, etc.). This way they can get used to staying inside certain boundaries even when they no longer have them. For example, I think it's good to learn to live with strong encapsulation before one comes to Perl and finds object systems that mostly don't enforce it.

In reply to Re: Perl as one's first programming language by kyle
in thread Perl as one's first programming language by amarquis

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.