I guess I have to come to the defense of programmers in this case.<grin/> I've never worked in systems administration, but I am a self-taught programmer who went back for an MSCS.
It's important to realize that almost every group of people will have some idiots. At my last job, I worked very hard to make certain that nothing that I touched would be the cause of problems at 3am. This was only partly because the company had a history of calling in the developers if there was a problem. Mostly it was because I want my code to run quietly and correctly. On the other hand I've had times when I spent hours tracking down a problem in "my system" only to find that someone had botched a manual backup and damaged some critical data files. Now, to try to get back on topic.<grin/> Before this thread started I hadn't really thought about intro programming languages. I truly love Perl and have written programs ranging from quick-and-dirty one-shot scripts to mission-critical applications using it. But it occurs to me that a large portion of what you need to write good Perl is a firm understanding of Perl's idioms. This is not something that I would wish on anyone teaching a group of students who had never programmed before. Granted, one or two will 'get it' and learn to program well. But, probably most of the class would stare blankly.<shrug/> Between my undergraduate in engineering and my masters in CS, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that academia is geared to introduce people to theory and knowledge, but does nothing to teach skills and practice. As has been said, Perl seems mostly about the latter. Sorry for the rant. G. Wade -- We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. -- Robert Wilensky, UCB
