Well, of course it would. Perl was originally designed for such machines, so it would only makes more sense to learn it on such machines. I think this is mostly because of the naming schemes. A Winduz dude will have to start out by learning function names like mkdir, opendir, flock, or kill. Any UNIX user with a fair amount of experience already knows what these mean and what their arguments are (I come from a C background). These are all holdovers from UN*X C. A Winduz programmer will only spend more time learning these UN*X specifics.

It always scared me what my perl script is doing under Winduz because, frankly, there's no security. One can pretty much write over any file, causing potentially system-damaging results if, for example, the script is placed in the wrong directory.

Everyone knows that fork under Winduz is certainly not the same as fork under UN*X. Hell, it works only in the most minimal cases. It's rather obvious that Perl is UN*X-centric, I don't mind at all. That's my domain. For the Winduz users, it is really only an "adaptation".

The first hurdle for any programmer is to learn the environment. For MacOS and Winduz, this means potentially screwing with the GUI API and other system functionality. While Perl lets you get around that and even makes it easy to link to these APIs, there is no such hurdle under UN*X. If you want your text streamer, you get text streaming, there's no faking it. UN*X programmers benefit from a well-documented, clean-filesystem, and generic library interface.

For folks who have never programmed before, I would say it would make little difference whether they start with M$ or UN*X. They've never seen such constructs and Perl is extremely portable, meaning that the code is really the same. (OK, pretty much) What's the difference? The editor comes to mind. While they may feel more secure using a colorful IDE under their native operating system, I guess it's really just a matter of taste. While I'm programming, I abhor the mouse. The only two commands I need are:

emacs hackthematrix.pl
perl hackthematrix.pl
[download]

What's simpler than that folks, eh? I don't think choice of editor has much impact on the learning of the language itself unless one considers sytax highlighting as "helpful".

Enjoy Linux and reap the benefits of a fine server-capable, stable machine!

AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.