I don't think Perl is any better or worse than many other languages to learn.

I think it is. Perl is a powerful, but dangerous language. We don't learn people how to drive in a Ferrari, people don't learn to fly in an F-16 jet, nor do people learn to read using Shakespeare plays. Why should computer languages be any different? Other languages are, IMO, much more suited to learn programming in. To name a few, Pascal, Python, Java, Haskell. Probably Eiffel as well.

I also think that Perl isn't a suitable language for everyone. In fact, I believe that more than 75% of the people currently using Perl should be using a different language (or maybe not even program at all). The influx of bad programmers due to the popularity of the web certainly plays a role here.

Abigail