I would like to speak in support of Chmrr's position here not because I've taken AP Computer Science, but because I have seen its consequences.

I'm a junior in college now and past most of the basic CSci courses required for the major. Now in my classes I'm starting to see a lot of people who never had to take the beginning courses that I did because they got out of them through AP....and it seems to me that a lot of these people didn't get the same fundamentals that I got through my first university CSci classes. This slows the pace of the class down and prevents my professors from covering all their material. Now this obviously isn't AP's fault completely, but I think their curriculum has had a noticeable effect.

I am all for getting people started in the fundamentals of programming the best way that we can find, and if that means independently encouraging young people to take up Perl, then that's definitely something worth considering.