Tangentially related, I happened to come across this blog post bemoaning the ascendency of Java in CS teaching. Back in my day the introductory stuff was all Pascal, and then usually C in later courses (save things like the survey of languages classes, or the AI classes). I don't think there were any specific courses on Perl (or things like shell or awk for that matter). Pretty much something you picked up on your own as needed.

(And it's "Perl" not PERL.)