We need to put Perl in secondary schools. That's where I first heard about C, and thought it was what I should be programming in.

When I had my first tech job, as a web designer, I was actually trying to write a C program to mess around with text data while I was there, using "Bloodshed C++" or something - the only freeware compiler I could find for Windows. (I think I found out about gcc, but I was too rookie to understand how to build or install it.)

Anyway, I never finished that task. If only I had known Perl, I could have whipped up a script in minutes. (Well, probably many minutes. But it would have got done.)

In fact I got exposed to Perl for the first time in that job, in the form of CGI visitor counters. I looked at the code and thought "what is this mess that looks a bit like C"?. Sadly, it was 7 years before I picked up Perl again.

Get to the youngest developers you can. I want my daughters to learn Perl as early as possible. Probably not as their first programming language, though. I'm still teaching them to read at the moment... Congratulations, hangon for suggesting this and especially RonW for actually getting out there and doing it!