in reply to Do you enjoy unproductive programmers in your organization??
in thread References

No, what I am saying is that if I have to teach someone perl (or any other programming language for that matter), the last thing I want to show is actual references and explain how they work since this requires me also to tell about how the memory layout of a machine is, how transfer of arguments work etc.

If I feel that the person I'm teaching is currently not able to cope with this, I wont squash him with something that will make him go home feeling he is totally lost.
Rather I will try to teach him regular expression, hashes and arrays. Why do you think that the book Learning Perl doesnt even cover references?

T I M T O W T D I

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by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Aug 20, 2001 at 19:36 UTC
    No, Learning Perl doesn't cover references. However, that means that merlyn felt that references shouldn't be brought up in the first 4 weeks of teaching a complete novice how to program from scratch. A complete novice, not a professional learning another language.

    If you have someone who already knows how to program, they shouldn't be using Learning Perl after the first week. They should be diving into Programming Perl and loving it! When I taught my successors at my previous position how to program in Perl, I didn't waste their time with Learning Perl. They knew how to program, and quite well. They just didn't know Perl.

    You don't need to describe memory locations or anything like that to someone who knows Java or C/C++. "A reference is basically a pointer, but nicer." is what you tell a C programmer. "A reference is a reference." is what you tell a Java programmer. There. That's all there is to references.

    I'm sorry, but I fail to see why you want to baby your professionals.

    ------
    /me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!

    Vote paco for President!

[reply]
      Who said I was talking about professionel programmers?

      I was talking about people with experience in awk/sh, students having completed their first curses etc. that is NOT so professionel programmers, nor anybody who knows anything about refs in either java or any other language nor pointers in C/C++.

      I totally agree with you, when we are talking about professionel programmers.

      T I M T O W T D I
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