Some random thoughts on the subject.

• I used to think that Perl was a bad choice for a first language, but then I read Andrew Johnson's Elements of Programming with Perl and now I'm less convinced.
• I still think that you appreciate Perl more if you've got a background in some more 'traditional' language. If it's your first language, you won't know how much easier most things are in Perl than, say, C.
• The problem is not so much that Perl is hard, but that programming is hard. There seems to be a believe that anyone can write CGI programs in Perl because "it's only a scripting language" or "web stuff is easy", but you really shouldn't be thinking or writing CGI stuff without a strong understanding of programming (especially network security issues) otherwise you end up with something like Matt's Script Archive (and if anyone's not sure - that's a bad thing)

Er... I'm not sure what my conclusion is :)

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me