I certainly don't think that Perl is too tough for beginners. Before Perl, my only programming experience was in Basic. My experience in Basic taught me about items that are necessary in every language, like structure and flow control. Later experience in Visual Basic taught me to drop my bad goto habit.

About two years ago, I was able to quite easily make the jump to Perl. Other programmers I have showed Perl to have trouble grasping the concept of not designing a user interface, and moving away from event based programming, but other than that, they find it easy accomplish simple tasks almost immediately.

Then again, I might be wrong. The people that I hack with think that command lines are intuitive and that point-and-click wastes time. My best advice: Try it. If it works for you, great, and if it doesn't, Python is pretty nice.

-Update-
Sorry about all of the copyright symbols. It looks like I have to report another Mozilla bug... In case you only saw this after the edit, Mozilla put in copyright symbols instead of periods (among other things.) The problem is, it lookes fine in Mozilla. Even worse, I spent an hour updating a Slash site before I noticed. It took about two hours to fix.

=IndyZ