Re: Where are future senior programmers coming from?

I think that we have better ways of teaching new Perl programmers now. When I started, I got "Learning CGI Programming with Perl in 21 Days". I don't recommend this book to anyone. If I ever find where I put my copy, I will likely burn it in effigy. Though it got me started in Perl, it also took years before I shed myself of its bad habits.

These days, we can point new programmers to some of merlyn's books. Many of the entry-level classes for Perl are teaching 'use strict' as if it's what you always put at the top of every Perl file along with the shebang line.

After those initial classes, though, there's still a big learning curve. They'll have a better start than I did, but most places that write good Perl code still wouldn't hire them, simply because those places know that they can only hire the top 10%.

That's a huge problem, and I'm honestly at a loss on how to solve it. The best solution I've come up with is to get hired by a company that has garbage Perl code, hang around PerlMonks a lot, and then jump ship to a good company as soon as they can. But that seems like a cop-out solution.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

Comment on Re: Where are future senior programmers coming from?

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Re^2: Where are future senior programmers coming from? by tilly (Archbishop) on Sep 07, 2006 at 02:43 UTC
That may be a cop-out solution, but it is the one that I suspect is most likely to happen. And the Perl community has a good selection of books for those people to learn from. Getting real-world experience is still problematic, but you've at least made the path to competency more direct. Another solution is to steal people who have learned in another environment and train them in Perl. And indeed a large fraction of good Perl programmers cut their teeth in languages such as C/C++, Smalltalk or Lisp. A third solution is to create a company culture of disciplined code reviews. Of whatever level of formality, down to pair programming. I suspect that a company like that could get by with a few smart juniors. Their mistakes would be caught by whoever worked with them, and the environment would ensure that they didn't stay junior for very long. However I can't actually name any companies off of the top of my head who train new Perl programmers that way. However Geoffrey Young (of mod_perl fame) said that he learned in an environment like that at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) and seemed to have a positive impression of it. Something that I'm wondering is how good a job various Perl training courses do in jumpstarting the process. We have very good people (eg merlyn, Dominus and TheDamian) teaching these courses, and they put a lot of work into making them good. Does anyone have positive (or negative) testamonials to how well they work?	[reply]

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Re^2: Where are future senior programmers coming from?
by tilly (Archbishop) on Sep 07, 2006 at 02:43 UTC

Another solution is to steal people who have learned in another environment and train them in Perl. And indeed a large fraction of good Perl programmers cut their teeth in languages such as C/C++, Smalltalk or Lisp.

A third solution is to create a company culture of disciplined code reviews. Of whatever level of formality, down to pair programming. I suspect that a company like that could get by with a few smart juniors. Their mistakes would be caught by whoever worked with them, and the environment would ensure that they didn't stay junior for very long.

However I can't actually name any companies off of the top of my head who train new Perl programmers that way. However Geoffrey Young (of mod_perl fame) said that he learned in an environment like that at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) and seemed to have a positive impression of it.

Something that I'm wondering is how good a job various Perl training courses do in jumpstarting the process. We have very good people (eg merlyn, Dominus and TheDamian) teaching these courses, and they put a lot of work into making them good. Does anyone have positive (or negative) testamonials to how well they work?

[reply]