in reply to Perl for Non-Programmers...

I had some didactic experience (programming basic courses for freashmen). First of all, I told the students that the choice of the programming language was an incidental fact. Not very important (we used Pascal).

Coding was only matter of translation from meta-language (used to develop a solution) to programming language.

It seems that using a natural language instead of another does not influence the way one thinks (I suggest reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct)

I'm not so sure of that for what concerns programming languages, in particular for Perl. In programming languages do exist different paradigms: it doesn't happen in natural languages. But this is another thread.

I was talking about my experience. My impression is that is not actually difficult to comprehend what a scalar or a vector is.

What seem really difficult to teach are structured programming principles and techniques. By-value- and by-reference calls, scope and so on. I don't mention recursion, that seems really hard (are you including it in your book?)

see you. larsen

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Re: Re: Perl for Non-Programmers...
by mrmick (Curate) on Feb 22, 2001 at 18:45 UTC
    By teaching the reader how to program, I mean that I will be teaching the basics. If I ge too ambitious in what I want to show them, the book will be much too large and intimidating. mathra made an excellent point about the size of the book. I plan for it to contain ~300 pages (including examples and exercises).

    I will be demonstrating structured programming and will stress the importance of logic in programming. In fact, I have a section called "The Logic of Truth".

    I won't get into vectors or recursions. Let them learn the basics and then graduate to one of the other fine books out there for more meat.

    btw.. I found it difficult to describe (in writing) what a scalar is to a novice. I simply stuck with stating (paraphrasing) that it's the basic data type in Perl and gave some examples.

    Mick
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