The plain fact is we must 'choose' a language to use to discuss algorithms. C++ tends to clutter the conversation with classes; other languages change frequently and in strange ways that also tend to confuse the conversation. Let's do it in Perl.

Let's not. Much as I love Perl I think there are much better languages to teach complete newbies. There are too many places you have to jump through hoops and use non-core stuff to illustrate basic concepts.

No. If advocacy uses the 'TRY before you buy' approach, the students would already understand that Perl is not the most efficient language for IMPLEMENTATION of every solution, but rather, is more than adequate for DISCUSSION.

But it isn't. It's a lousy language to discuss, for example, compile time typing.

In face I'd hate to see any educational programme just use one language. I'd want them to use something functional, something declarative, something procedural, something where they had to do the memory management, something when they were writing direct in assembler (even if for a VM), something with compile time typing, something with type inference, something with dynamic typing, etc.

Strange, if you type "Mark Jason Dominus" in the search line at Google you get dozens of links that have "Perl" in the title. The top five hits do not read "C++" or "Pascal" or anything else. Behold, Mark's latest book, Higher Order Perl is also about Perl. I'm grinning as I write this.

I imagine if you google me most of the programming language related content will relate to Perl.

If you Alta Vista'd me ten years ago you'd find most of my programming language related content would be Pop-11/Lisp.

If you knew me 20 years ago (before I'd heard of all this new fangled internet nonsense) any programming language conversations would have resolved around BASIC, 6502 assembler and Z80A assembler.

Not that that's an exhaustive list of language by any means.

In ten years time, probably less than that, I guarantee that I'm not going to be writing mostly about Perl 5.

My profession is a software developer. Only one of the skills involved in creating good software is programming. Only one of the tools used for programming is Perl.

It's a damn good tool, and I use it a lot at the moment. That's not to say I won't throw it away in an instant if somebody shows me a better tool I can use instead.

For example I've been writing a lot more Ruby over the last year or so since it makes me jump through fewer hoops when writing OO code.

Any software developer who ties themselves to just one language, unless it's something like COBOL with legacy lock in and rich users, is doomed.

I'm in complete agreement with MJD. Language advocacy is largely counter productive.