I think Perl makes a poor choice as a first language simply because it's too big. The size of Programming Perl alone is enough to crush dreams. Yes there are shorter books but none of them actually teaches you the whole language!

Starting on Scheme makes a lot of sense to me - I wish that's how I'd started, really. The interactive prompt is a great fit for learning along with a book and there's some great beginner materials out there for Scheme. The one downside is that for most working programmers Scheme is going to be essentially useless.

Starting with C, which is what I did, also has some strong points. Like Scheme it's a little langauge - K&R covers everything you need to know in around 200 pages. Better yet there's just so much C code around to learn from - pretty much everything that a computer can do has been programmed in C. And it's really useful in that we all work on C-based systems (like Perl and Linux, say) every day. Knowing how to read and patch them is a great tool, even if your every-day work happens at a higher level.

-sam

In reply to Re: Perl as one's first programming language by samtregar
in thread Perl as one's first programming language by amarquis

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.