Hi,
I've been a lurker on the list for quite a number of years now, and
don't often write, but in this case I wanted to throw out some thoughts.
I work for Harvard Extension School (HES). We used to offer a Perl class,
and it was reasonably popular - we had (have?) some bioinformatics classes
that like(d) perl a lot (I put the parens, because I don't know what
they're doing these days). It was also taught for web, and we still have
people who write Perl in some web groups and for other things. However,
when our previous Perl instructor moved to New Hampshire to run an organic
farm, there was no one interested in taking over the class, so it ended,
and Perl hasn't been taught at HES for some years now.
Just FYI, Java IS a strongly typed language - you declare your var
type and then it's unchangeable, e.g. something declared as an int can
only hold an int. Java became hugely popular in the 90's when the web
became popular, because you can do applets and animation in it - since
then, it's had money and manpower to develop sophisticated frameworks and
API's for web business management (Javabeans, Java Enterprise Edition,
etc.). It's now owned and managed by Oracle, since they bought Sun MS.
At HES, over the coming year we'll offer classes in LAMP (PHP), Groovy and
Grails, lots of Java/C/C++/.NET. Last year there was a class on Ruby.
Python seems to be grouped with other web development items in some of
those classes. No Perl (yet?).
Since the precedent is there, I'd say the potential exists for the
Perl class to again be offered if a qualified instructor would become
available. If any of you who are Perl experts has the time and interest
to consider teaching it, I can at least get you in to talk to the people
who decide what classes we offer. If you don't want poorly-trained Perl
programmers coming to your companies, here's one way to change that.
Anybody interested in more information (feel free to write me off-list)?
Thanks, Jan Jackson
Jan Jackson
Harvard University
Division of Continuing Education
51 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
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