Hi! On Thursday 12 March 2009 12:44:55 Gabor Szabo wrote: > hi, > > recently there was short discussion on use.perl > on "Bringing Perl to University". > > http://use.perl.org/~Eric+Wilhelm/journal/38612 > > As response I asked there > > "What advantage would Perl give to a University student?" > > but have not received many responses. > > So I'd like to ask you guys. Do you see anything that knowing > Perl could give to the regular CS or Engineering student? >
I'd like to give my perspective as a former undergraduate student for Electrical Engineering in http://www.technion.ac.il/ . I've learned Perl to a large extent before I started my studies, but expanded my knowledge of Perl during and after my studies. Advantages that Perl gave me were: 1. A useful stepping stone for Scheme. I read the http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ book and afterwards took the two SICP courses as part of my studies, and Perl (which is very similar to Scheme) was similar enough to make learning Scheme easier. I should note that studying SICP made me a better Perl programmer, because I learned better about subroutine-refs and closures. 2. A useful scripting tool. See http://www.perl.org.il/pipermail/perl/2003-October/003151.html for example. I used Perl scripts extensively for performing various tasks in my studies. 3. Usefulness in projects. In my first project ( http://ip-noise.berlios.de/ ) I used Perl to prototype our IP-level noise simulator using IP-Queue and a Perl module that supported it. We later re-implemented it in C, and even ported it to run inside the kernel, but the Perl code was a useful prototype. And the compiler from the user-friendly syntax for programming the simulator to its serialised binary format, is still written in Perl, which saved us a lot of time. My second project: http://comnet.technion.ac.il/projects/spring02/cn01s02/ was implemented entirely in Perl. 4. Perl otherwise proved good for enlightenment and perspective on various stuff. ---------- I should note that I still studied using mostly C and C++ in my degree. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ What does "Zionism" mean? - http://xrl.us/bjn8u God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read. _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list [email protected] http://perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
