in reply to Re: Requesting suggestions for one day Perl course
in thread Requesting suggestions for one day Perl course

These students have been using C++ and .NET -- I plan to ask the instructor what assignments they've been doing recently, and see if I can take one or two of the tougher ones and doing it in a single line of Perl. I'm hoping for the 'dropped jaw' look. :)

I'm also going to talk about meta-subjects, such as this web site and the other Perl web sites that are available, as well as talk about the Perl community and YAPC::NA.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

Life is short: get busy!

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Re: Re: Re: Requesting suggestions for one day Perl course
by esskar (Deacon) on Mar 01, 2004 at 18:13 UTC
    Maybe then it is a good idea to not pull them out of an environement they are used to but using .NET Perl. It is fully integrateable into Visual Studio.
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      Really? I imagined showing them some stuff from the command line, but if I can set them up to use Perl from within Visual Studio (which I assume they have) that would be dynamite.

      Do you have any references for this?

      Alex / talexb / Toronto

      Life is short: get busy!

      Update:Thanks to esskar, I have found the appropriate page on ActiveState's web site is here.

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        I think this is a mistake. For one, you are binding them to Microsoft servitude and this will cause them to think less. Part of Perl (though we do have Win32 support) comes from the Unix culture. A ton of it. Perl initially was (and still is) a blend of sed, awk, and lots of Unix tools. The power of Perl would not have arisen if it's birthplace was Win32.

        Also, how many programmers avoid Linux because they are bound to VC++? It's scary. VC++ is an overglorified text editor once you know how to write makefiles -- makefiles are easy -- everyone needs to know them who does C/C++.

        Show them to ActiveState.com -- tell them the compiler is free and encourage them to download it. They will love free tools, free documentation, etc, etc. They can still use MSVC as an editor, or something free like Crimson Editor instead!

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