Dear All,
thank you a lot - these were superb answers and I have now a lot of homework to do.
It seems that half of you are suggesting jumping to a different language. I have considered that often (the most serious contenders would be Rust, JavaScript, and Kotlin), but I do concur with xiaoyafeng and others - Perl is not at all bad for him, versatile and playful, and also just beautiful, I find. And he can learn the concepts here as well as anywhere else.
His case is however a bit untypical - I am not looking for beginners' stuff. He made his way through "Learning Perl" and "Intermediate Perl" very swiftly, and now I can hardly separate him from "Programming Perl". But he usually writes very self-referential stuff that doesn't do much - he plays with the concepts, builds modules, objects, regexes, complicated data structures with references, that sort of thing. But that is also partly because he does not know to do anything but text-output on the console. So I am in the weird situation trying to interest him in maybe writing a game or so.
As for the rest of the tech stack: It's all Linux only, and he has little acquaintance with or interest in phones, and he does have some sense of HTML and CSS.
I do feel glad he took so well to a language that I like and that we could explore it together (he is already way better than me), but I also do feel bad seeing him a bit stuck or confined (although he does not experience it as such). Anyway, I think with all the new options you gave me, for now we will stick with Perl and see what these various suggestions can do.
One note about "outdated technology": Yes, I get it's not quite yet so. I guess I am more worried about the trajectory. Perl and Python (which really never did it for me) are pretty much the same age. However, Python has been going places (partly for the very reasons I dislike it) while Perl, even though it keeps hanging in there, has very few new users and uses. Even more importantly it seems unclear whether the community can productively unify behind a consistent development of the language. This is why I fear it may be on its way out. I really hope I am wrong.
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