in reply to Re: Popularity of Perl vs. availability of Perl developers
in thread Popularity of Perl vs. availability of Perl developers

I mostly agree with you on your University comments. I am glad that my Computer Science study began with Pascal and from their went to C. The year after mine, Melbourne Uni Computer Science replaced Pascal with Miranda (a functional language) which I think is a capital idea - first teach students a less common (but powerful) approach before they get 'stuck' into procedural thinking so that they can see more than one way to do things.

Software Engineering courses these days contain higher level subjects these days like Web Engineering where concepts like online communities are discussed. The fastest way to play with online communities is certainly not C :) Courses like that are definately up for alternative approaches like Perl or OpenACS (as is used for that course).

FYI: I am based in Sydney myself these days, and your use of the term "enthusiast" is an important clarification. Developers or admins who know how to hack a short perl script are not the same as a Perl developer.

Another thing I should point out is that I also didn't use to consider myself a "Perl Developer" - candidates for hiring as a Perl developer can include people comfortable and experienced with good programming practises who have shown their adaptability to other languages. Unfortunately that skill is even harder to test than Perl skills!

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Re^3: Popularity of Perl vs. availability of Perl developers
by Jenda (Abbot) on Sep 25, 2005 at 13:03 UTC

    I'm not so sure it's good to learn Miranda (or any other modern language) before C. It's painfull to go fourty years back in time. That's like teaching them chopping trees with a chainsaw first and then trying to teach them to use a hack. Yeah, you cut the tree down with both, but if you can do it in five minutes with a chainsaw, it feels stupid to spend an hour sweating with a hack. Sure sometimes hack is the right tool, but it should IMHO be taught first.

    Jenda
    XML sucks. Badly. SOAP on the other hand is the most powerfull vacuum pump ever invented.

[reply]
      I'm not so sure it's good to learn Miranda (or any other modern language) before C. It's painfull to go fourty years back in time. That's like teaching them chopping trees with a chainsaw first and then trying to teach them to use a hack.

      I disagree. I've found it far easier to instil good development practices with modern languages and then move people to languages like C, rather than waste inordinate amounts of time teaching people low level languages and then spend time breaking them of the bad habits they pick up.

[reply]

        Maybe the difference is that you were teaching while I was learning. After learning ML having to cope with C, having to waste insane amounts of effort on things that are automatic elsewhere, having to circumvent type systems that are far far too restrictive to be of any use, having to free memory myself, being unable to do all the things I got used to ... that was painfull. And is one of the reasons why I never really learned C.

        Jenda
        XML sucks. Badly. SOAP on the other hand is the most powerfull vacuum pump ever invented.

[reply]

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