Well, just to bust the myth that youngsters don't use Perl....

Perl is my son's first programming language, he started at the age of 11. His first program was a guessing game.

So why would a kid start programming in Perl?

Well, first of all the basics of Perl are not that difficult. For instance scalar variables don't require you to choose between integers, real, character, string, etc. They simply provide a memory container for whatever you feel fit. For flow control the 'if' and 'while' constructs are sufficient to start with.

Secondly, quick positive feedback! It is straightforward to link a small Perl program to some operating system application using the system call. Provided with a almost oneliner example my son could use text-to-speech and generate voice feedback via his programs. And what's more rewarding than to make your computer speak? Cool!
He used something like this:

$text='Congratulations, your guess was right';
system("say $text");
[download]

The say application was really a tiny Perl script that I've written for him to call the text-to-speech program festival on a Linux box with arguments so that it would simply voice the string provided to it.

As with all things kids need a little guidance especially in the beginning to get them going. It's not too difficult to write a broken Perl program yet it feels great once the hurdle is taken. So I had him expiriment a bit yet made sure that he didn't get stuck too long until he was sufficiently able and motivated to debug on his own.
Once his interest was raised a translated version of the book "Teach yourself Perl in 24 hours" was all he needed...

I hope this node inspires many people to help their kids get started with Perl. One of the best parts of Perl is that it is suited for writing very simple to very complex programs. No need to keep it a secret!

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