I think English is not a good first language. Sure, there might be a few successes, but just go read any usenet group for a month and see how often and horribly it can go wrong.

English is a powerful, but dangerous language. We don't learn people how to drive using a Ferrari, people don't learn to fly in an F-16 jet, nor do people learn programming by implementing machine translation systems. Why should natural languages be any different? It's good to have training wheels. Many language IMO are much more suited to learn a language. To name a few: Latin, Classical Greek and Hebrew. Probably Classical Chinese as well.

English is not suitable for everyone. In fact, I believe that more than 75% of the people currently speaking English should be using a different language (or maybe not even speak at all). Using English as a first language only increases the number of bad English speakers, further clogs forums like comp.lang.perl.misc and contributes to the bad name Perl already has.

Hanamaki