Re: [Boston.pm] academic use of Perl
> Adam Turoff wrote: >> - 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. I wish to clerify a comment about WPI's policy on Perl. My previous statment was from the NON-academic side of WPI. So the school's servers do no accept PHP. But the courses at WPI accept just about all languages. Courses are taught non-language specific. but seeing as how PHP is no longer supported on our servers, students can no longer run tests on our servers unless they use an acceptable programming language. Perl is becoming more common among our students for this very reason. --Alex ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] academic use of Perl
>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. Exactly. The wolf book would make an excellent text-book for a beginner's guide to algorythms (for non-CS majors?). -- H4sICNoBwDoAA3NpZwA9jbsNwDAIRHumuC4NklvXTOD0KSJEnwU8fHz4Q8M9i3sGzkS7BBrm OkCTwsycb4S3DloZuMIYeXpLFqw5LaMhXC2ymhreVXNWMw9YGuAYdfmAbwomoPSyFJuFn2x8 Opr8bBBidcc= -- MOTD on Setting Orange, the 60th of Chaos, in the YOLD 3171: Quoth the raven, "Nevermore!" ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
RE: [Boston.pm] academic use of Perl
Note "academic" is implying "Computer Science" not "Engineering" or "IT Education" -- professors who publish research and hope their grad students will grow up to be professors just like them. The eclectic nature of Perl makes it (a) not well suited to the purist CompSci academic style Perl ... The anti-Lisp (or anti-Scheme) (b) not a small tutorial language Perl ... The anti-Pascal (c) TIMTOWDI makes it hard to assign homework that will exercise the desired new skills ... without so over specifying that the assignment is always trivial. (brian_d_foy has written about the fun of writing assignments for Learning Perl recently.) (I know one student reading ahead in the manuals that caused this problem with PL/I, called Perl/67 by one wit, but he *worked* at it. No, it wasn't me.) (d) Not describable by a simple grammar, Perl ... The Anti-Pascal, anti-Ada, Anti-Java, anti-... A reference BNF grammar is thought essential when teaching beginning intro language since the later course will be writing a boot-strap parser ... And all the intro languages had simple BNFs back when that was the only way to build them. Doesn't mean it has to be that way, but it is assumed. Perl tutorials demonstrate it's NOT necessary, but CS may still believe it. I will be intrigued to hear of theoretical computer scientists, as opposed to applied MIS / IT classes, using Perl. I expect that will be the exception. Bill Not speaking for the firm ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] academic use of Perl
Tom Metro said: > A few years ago I hired an instructor to teach a group of junior > developers OO programming. Next time you're thinking of doing this, shoot me an email. http://www.greglondon.com/iperl >From zero-perl/zero-OO to basic OO-perl in about a hundred pages. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] academic use of Perl
Adam Turoff wrote: - 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 ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
