>>>>> "John" == WWW <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
John> So why don't they teach Perl at the University level? Based on John> my experience, the answer is simple: Very few faculty and staff John> know Perl well enough to teach it. I was in school not that long John> ago, and I didn't know any prof's or asst. prof's that knew Perl John> to any significant level. There were a few grad students who John> knew Perl, but even they weren't knowledgable enough to put John> together curriculum. I think the reason very few faculty in CS departments know perl well enough to teach says a lot about the kind of "programmer" attracted to perl in the first place. Programmers who come from a Systems Administration background are far more likely to have a working knowledge of perl, simply because the sys admin problem space has always been where perl shines brightest. It was only in in later years, with the emergence of the web, and CGI.pm, that perl was considered a "web development" language. Now, I may be going out on a limb here, since my educational is in Math and Physics, and I have little to no experience with CS departments, but I would suspect that most CD faculty identify more strongly with applications development and perhaps systems design, and few of them have a traditional sys admin background. Perl is still viewed by most in academia as "just another scripting language", like sed, awk, etc. I don't think its ever been given the respect it deserves, and that may be party due, additionally, to the fact that it was developed in an open source context, and wasn't developed through a more formal process, and/or backed by industry. It took me years to get Morgan Stanley senior management to officially recognize perl as an application development language, and today it is treated with the same respect as C++ and Java, but it was an uphill battle. I had to fight the same war as one would fight if attempting to get perl recognized as a language for teaching at a university. Namely, most of the senior development managers did NOT have any background in sys admin, so they didn't have a context in which to appreciate the language. The problem space they all worked in was one in which perl was NOT necessarily optimal.
