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