I strongly disagree and i --'ed your node accordingly.

Low level introductions are good since they help people without experience in programming. Hell, this tutorial will even help people with experience in <insert favorite language here> if it's the first thing they read about perl.

Also, PHP did not target "idiot non-programmers"; it targeted "non-programmers" - which caused problems, I agree, but mainly in language design, not in documentation (except for the user-edited docs on php.net - which I frankly find terribly vague and untrustworhty)