The size of the language is not relevant to the novice (or initiate). What matters is how much you need to know to start producing a functioning program, and how easy it is to incrementally learn more features. Perl is perfect on that count. PL/I and C++, on the other hand, are famous for producing astonishing diagnostics.

Having a minimum amount of red-tape to get a "Hello World" program running is probably the most important thing for a fist language—especially to self-taught programmers. Perl is as good as it gets on that point.

I don't think Perl should be the only language known or used by a professional programmer, but it's the best choice for non-programmers, because you can know as little or do as much as you could possibly want.

For training a professional programmer, it's still the best choice. It allows you to start working on programming, rather than housekeeping, red tape, and such. That can be taught later, with C, and assembly. OO programming should come later. And I still believe in C++, but maybe Java will do. Maybe Perl 6 will do.

sas

In reply to Re^2: Perl as one's first programming language by sasdrtx
in thread Perl as one's first programming language by amarquis

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