Perl was designed around two slogans: "the UNIX swiss-army chainsaw" and "there's more than one way to do it" (for any value of "it").
I first met Perl after spending some years working in the UNIX command line environment, and it made intuitive sense ... to someone who primarily used awk, sed, and bash (and able to get stuff done in C). I was up to speed and productive in it within a couple of days. (This was in the days of Perl 4 -- the OO stuff in Perl 5 came years later.) At that level, Perl was basically every UNIX text-handling tool rolled into one handy bundle oriented around script execution rather than interactive shell work, with a bunch of POSIX extras and things like the socket() API thrown in to take it beyond the toy language level.
The point is, Perl isn't a beginner's language. Rather, it's an elaboration of a pre-existing toolset that assumes you're already familiar with the UNIX way before you get started. Pitching it against a teaching language isn't even an apples/oranges comparison: it's like comparing a circus merry-go-round to a helicopter (they're simply not intended for the same purpose or the same user demographic).
I first met Perl after spending some years working in the UNIX command line environment, and it made intuitive sense ... to someone who primarily used awk, sed, and bash (and able to get stuff done in C). I was up to speed and productive in it within a couple of days. (This was in the days of Perl 4 -- the OO stuff in Perl 5 came years later.) At that level, Perl was basically every UNIX text-handling tool rolled into one handy bundle oriented around script execution rather than interactive shell work, with a bunch of POSIX extras and things like the socket() API thrown in to take it beyond the toy language level.
The point is, Perl isn't a beginner's language. Rather, it's an elaboration of a pre-existing toolset that assumes you're already familiar with the UNIX way before you get started. Pitching it against a teaching language isn't even an apples/oranges comparison: it's like comparing a circus merry-go-round to a helicopter (they're simply not intended for the same purpose or the same user demographic).