A lot of beginners have trouble with the concept of object-oriented programming, that's why our first year university programming course is going to switch from Java to Python (I personally have been marking a lot of really terrible Java code). Java is a good object-oriented application programming language, but procedural thinking should be set straight first. And Perl is very good to hack together useful and usable things quickly, just what a newbie wants. I'm not advocating Perl as "the one and the only", but given a choice between the two, I'd go for Perl first.