There are people at/from MIT who use perl (Small Languages conferences anyone?) Myself and Alex V. included. Not so long ago, SIPB used to be home to some perl folk too. IME though, there aren't really that many coders at MIT, though I've recently soeen some folks working ona meebo-like thing in perl.
One answer is the obvious "perl is passe" POV. The other (who exactly says PHP is used at all?) is the EECS department's stance that they don't teach you how to programe in a language, they teach you to code: hence their use of Scheme (lambda calculus, and nothing anyone is likely to have prior experience with). Outside of EECS, there aren't many other places perl could "get a foothold." Aero/Astro folks use Ada, and the general "scientific programming" course hopped on the Java bandwagon (from C) sometime ago. Everyone else "programs" in Matlab. Now if somebody bolted PDL and SDL together in a point-and-hoot way, you'd have a nice tool that might serve introduce some folks to perl, as well giv'em something they could keep after graduation with a clean conscience :-P I suppose TIMTOWTDI also makes it harder to grade. Not only do you have to have a good set of test cases, you need to have knowledgable TAs. and then there's the historical difficulties of using perl (read modules) on a non-UNIX platform. -- Free map of local environmental resources: http://CambridgeMA.GreenMap.org -- MOTD on Prickle-Prickle, the 35th of Bureaucracy, in the YOLD 3173: Those of you who think you know everything are annoying those of us who do! _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
