I spent the first six or seven years learning (and later teaching) BASIC.

Then I discovered C, and Pascal, and FORTH, and Logo, and realized how much larger the world must be.

Perl IS neat and nifty for just about anything! FYI Perl is taught at the "lower levels", I myself took Perl my second year, maybe you should change schools? I wish it was around when I was in High School, but as Merlyn points out Perl wasn't around yet. shudders at BASIC =:-)

Perl is not necessarily going to be attractive as a pedagogical language - partly because of TIMTOWDI. Also, there have been criticisms that Perl code is auto-obfuscated, which makes evaluation on pedagogical grounds challenging.

In my (limited) experience, Perl is used to get things done, and teaching languages are used for teaching. Perl exposure in academia is more likely to happen in the experimental sciences or occasionally in the Arts. If you are interfacing with telescopes, gathering data from sensor arrays or modelling bioinformatic systems, you'll likely hear about Perl before it would come up in CS.

If Perl is so neat and nifty for the things its used for, why does it never get taught at a lower level?

Perl is a powerful language, but only in the hands of a skilled and experienced programmer. And then only some of them.

Im doing a masters and only just heard about it after christmas. I would like to see a choice of what languages you can learn when you begin you programming course.

Im doing a masters in Bioinformatics. My undergrad was computing and biology. Im not talking about what im doing here. What i said was "I only just heard about it after christmas", which is partly the fault of this uni, but also of all other uni's. None of them offer perl courses or teach perl programming.

For the same reason they don't teach quantum physics at a lower level. Nor do you get to use a 747 to get your pilot license. And your grandfather didn't take you out to sea for some shark fishing the day got your first fishing gear.

Perl is a powerful language, but only in the hands of a skilled and experienced programmer. And then only some of them.

I don't know-- I'd probably not count myself a "skilled and experienced programmer." I've taken a few classes in college, but I got turned on to perl in my work as a sysadmin-hobbyist. None of the tasks I wanted to automate were difficult; they were usually minor text transformation and redirection. Perl was great because it /was/ simple. As the camel book says, "Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible."

For teaching simple programming, perl's great-- you don't need all the magic incantations (class HelloWorld { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello, world!");}}) or strange operators (cout << "Hello, world") of other languages. You don't need to fight to teach about data structures (perl arrays are arrays, queues, stacks, and so forth), since they're just /there/ and working. And then there's passing by reference vs. value, which perl largely dwims away. If you want to introduce functional programming as compared to imperative programming, perl lets you do that, too. For basic programming, I'd probably start with perl instead of Java or other similar languages. There's certainly value in teaching C++, especially when you want to start talking about lower level computer guts, but basic programming doesn't generally need/want to talk about memory allocation and other complex problems.

Steve