I'm going to assume that academic formation is another way of saying "teaching students how to program".

I think that Perl is both very poorly and very excellently suited to being a teaching language.

It is a very poor first language because

First languages should really be something like Pascal, which is a very strict B&D (bondage and discipline) language. One needs to learn the fundamentals of structure before one can play. (I am a firm believer in a formalized guild system.)

It is an excellent second language for pretty much every reason I mentioned above, and then some. Once someone has learned why one should not do X or Y, then it is time to learn when one must do those things. Perl is an playground par excellence.

That said, it is all about the teacher and the syllabus. If one has a good teacher and a strong syllabus, you could teach programming in PDP-11 ASM and turn out excellent developers. On the flip side, one could take a language designed for teaching (Pascal) and make a mess of things with a poor teacher and weak syllabus. *shrugs*

Remember - if you type for more than 20-40% of your time, you're typing too much.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

In reply to Re: Academic Formation by dragonchild
in thread Teaching Perl inside an Academic Course by Mago

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