That would have been a nice luxury. My class is not made up of programmers. Most of them are research scientists. Many of them are web developers, and some are merely managers. (Sorry, boss!)

So, week 1 of my class looked like this:

• How to install Perl on Win95 and UNIX platforms
• Examples of text editors that can be used to write a Perl program
• print "Hello, World!";
• Running the program on Win95 and UNIX platforms
• Accessing documentation via perldoc, books, and web sites (including PerlMonks)
• Demos of some easy but useful programs that they would learn to write during the course

Maybe you can see why it took me a while to get where I am now.

And consider this: how could I explain the dangerous difference between my $var and my ($var) until they knew about scalar context vs. list context? And how could I explain context until they knew about scalars and lists? Furthermore, how could I explain the scoping rules until they knew about blocks and loops and subroutines?

buckaduck

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