- Another reason why Perl is a minority language is that it's not
used in academic curricula.
An interesting point.
Sean Quinlan writes:
I agree. I'd love to hear suggestions how to work on that. We teach some Perl at BU, both under the bioinformatics program and in some short tutorials, and I'm hoping to expand on that. I seem to recall Harvard having some courses.
To be effective at growing the pool of Perl programmers I think Perl needs to be used in a general course that isn't specifically about Perl or some specialty that is already well entrenched with Perl.
The problem is that Perl lacks the "purity" that other simpler, more structured languages have, which makes it less appealing for teaching concepts.
A few years ago I hired an instructor to teach a group of junior developers OO programming. Myself and another senior Perl developer debated back and forth over whether the use Perl or stick with Java, which is what the instructor knew and what the course materials were design for. In the end we decided that conveying the OO concepts was more important than the Perl implementation of them, so we went with Java, but supplemented it with Perl examples.
-Tom
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