hi all, i have been consulting with a local firm founded by some mit kids (hi justin!). i mentioned to them that they could use a few more inexpensive coders like some mit students but they said they can't find any who know perl. this brings me to the title of this email, perl vs. mit.
from what i can tell for some reason perl is not a major thing in the mit culture. sure it is used in niches like sysadmin, bioinformatics, etc. but it doesn't seem to be learned by the average CS student there and i wonder why? php is used a lot which is very surprising since it is such a poorly designed tool from a technical point of view. mit can't claim academic interest in php is high. there is also a very amusing cultural overlap between mit and perl that should make for a better overlap in usage. both groups use the term hacker in the classic sense of someone who hacks away at a project. mit possibly originated the usage and it is still prevalent there. we hacked away at lab assignments, thesis, problem sets and we were called hackers proudly. perl hackers also take on the term in a proud way (randal is probably the main source of that association). so why wouldn't there be more usage overlap given that common understanding and usage of the glorious hacker name? one idea is that mit is lisp/scheme and academically oriented and perl is so street and dirty. yet perl is closer to lisp than most other langs with its closures, lists, symbol manipulation, etc. perl just has infix notation and proper values (a scalar is much better than a lisp cell :). perl gets the job done which is a major mit engineering attribute. perl has been taught at mit during IAP (a january minisession) and there is/was a perl mailing list there. i haven't found much support for those things (all found through searching mit for YAPC hosting). as i said it is used in whitehead for bioinformatics and other niches but not much else. so any thoughts on why this is the case? any ideas on how to push perl at the tute? will perl6 win them over for academic reasons? thanx, uri -- Uri Guttman ------ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------- http://www.stemsystems.com --Perl Consulting, Stem Development, Systems Architecture, Design and Coding- Search or Offer Perl Jobs ---------------------------- http://jobs.perl.org _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
