In the ongoing "maintaining Perl" thread, various comments have been
made about teaching Perl and how it should not be done. Teaching Perl in
serious academic programs is a great way to advocate Perl. Reasons for
this should be moderately obvious. And when it was brought up at the
Town Meeting at TPC, various positive things were said about teaching
Perl.
I was wondering who amoung us is teaching Perl, and how they are doing
it. It would be great if we could have a BOF at YAPC about this. (There
is also one scheduled for TPC, but it's looking less and less like I'll
actually make it to TPC. Bummer.)
Some of the things that I'd like to discuss, either here or there, are:
What are you using for a text book? Do you consider Perl to be a good
first programming language? Do you assume that your students already
know how to program? What do you consider important to cover? To leave
out? To studiously avoid? Do you advocate strict and -w from day one,
and later teach where it can be carefully left off, or do you introduce
it later on, once they have basic concepts down? Where are you teaching?
(Online? A "real" school? A travelling seminar?) Do you issue any sort
of certificate, and, if so, is it really worth anything? Do you treat
Perl as a "CGI language" (whatever that means)?
I know that a number of these are potentially divisive issues, and
should probably not be discussed on this list. You probably know which
ones those are. (In case you don't know, that would be certification and
the whole strict and -w thing, each of which has been flogged to death,
and far beyond, on this, and other lists. Don't even go there.) But
others, IMHO, are important to the concept of advocacy, in that teaching
Perl, in real classes, as a "serious programming language", is a great
way to get people to take Perl seriously.
For my own Part, I think that Perl makes a great first programming
language, largely because it is so flexible and forgiving in syntax, and
also because it grows with a student's expertise. You can write toy
scripts in it, and you can write Power Tools with it. And everything in
between. I assume my students know how to type commands at a prompt of
some variety, and not much more. I teach Perl online. And, at the
moment, I use Andrew Johnson's book as my text book. I studiously avoid
talking about CGI, because there's just too much else that you have to
know first, and teaching someone CGI before they know how to program is
a recipe for Yet Another Matt Wright, not to mention moderately akin to
teaching someone to parallel park before they have their first driving
lesson.
Rich
--
Director of Web Application Development - The Creative Group
http://www.cre8tivegroup.com/
Author - Apache Server Unleashed - http://apacheunleashed.com/
