On Thursday, December 26, 2002, at 08:18 AM, Steven Lembark wrote:
Java, C++, or whatever are about formalism, which is easy to teach.
Perl is about getting work done, which is less easy to teach.
I haven't seen Perl in any curricula other than extension courses.
Extension courses tend to focus on practical things (real estate
licenses, various IT certificates, and so on).
Exception is biology and bioinformatics, where there
is a large enough body of work in Perl that it is a
first language for many.
I happen to work w/ two (2) languages not normally given much heed.
FORTRAN and Perl. I work at a company that still has F IV code laying
around, and no one has heard of F 90/95. As for Perl....I always hear
ppl espousing C++ as a good alternative. I never understand why,
though. Perl is C++ minus the garbage collecting. Well, that is an
over-simplification. At UW the only courses I know are some extension
courses in Perl....people who do not know programming other than their
exposure to "Hello, World" consistently make decisions on what
languages we engineers/scientists need to use based on "word on the
street." If I could figure a way to get Fortran to run with Perl using
Inline (but I am not at that level of CS) then I think Perl would
definitely gain a strong foothold in the sciences where FORTRAN
libraries could do a lot of the crunching and Perl could to the
pre/post processing....and a lot of older F IV and F77 code would get
new life as they become "black boxes" that crunch the numbers and Perl
provides the functionality. I have gone astray.
