in reply to How much time to become a good Perl programmer ?

It would take longer for an experienced Java/C/C++ programmer to become an excellent Perl programmer than it would a college intern. A Perl expert has a mindset that a static language developer simply cannot understand. Now, if you had said Lisp or Python or Ruby programer ...

This is not to say that you should hire the intern over the Java/C/C++ programmer. I've worked with C-in-Perl and Java-in-Perl many times. While I might cringe at the use of parallel arrays instead of hashes and for(;;) instead of foreach(), the code worked, had been working for years, and was reasonably bug-free.

I think you're asking two questions - expertise and usefulness. Of course, an experienced programmer will always be useful, regardless of retraining needs. They will just take longer to become an expert than if you started with a tabula rasa.

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
  • Comment on Re: How much time to become a good Perl programmer ?

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Re^2: How much time to become a good Perl programmer ?
by Tanktalus (Canon) on Jun 28, 2005 at 13:52 UTC

    Hmmm - before writing a lick of perl, I considered myself a very experienced C/C++ programmer, and a beginner Java programmer. (Of course, you'll have to take my word on those.) Now I consider myself an experienced perl programmer (although you can form your own opinion on that from my track record). I do believe that my background in C, C++, and, especially shell scripting, all contributed very highly to learning perl quickly and becoming useful in it.

    I do believe that I am one of the more effective perl programmers in our entire work group, and that I got that way partly from my C/C++ experience. That is, I learned to program, and then I learned some languages afterwards.

    I suppose the key to me is someone who likes to learn idiomatically. Who likes to write C in C, Java in Java, C++ in C++, shell in shell, Fortran absolutely nowhere, and will then likely want to write Perl in Perl. I suppose the tough part of this is figuring out that the candidate is such a person - asking this question point blank is useless as most people will understand what the desired answer is and give it, even if they don't really understand the question. Figuring out a behavioural question for this is going to be interesting.

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      Code samples are good things, as are "How would you solve this?" type questions. Remember - the first answer should always be "Check CPAN". If it's not, pass.
      My criteria for good software:
      1. Does it work?
      2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
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Re^2: How much time to become a good Perl programmer ?
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Jun 29, 2005 at 15:48 UTC
    It would take longer for an experienced Java/C/C++ programmer to become an excellent Perl programmer than it would a college intern.

    I disagree.

    It's certainly not been true in my experiences of teaching newbie and experienced developers Perl. There's a hell of a lot of programming knowledge that's not related to the static/dynamic divide.

    A Perl expert has a mindset that a static language developer simply cannot understand. Now, if you had said Lisp or Python or Ruby programer ...

    There's a rather big assumption here that experienced static Java/C/C++ programmers are a completely different group from experienced Lisp/Python/Ruby programmers :-)

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