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Eric Wilhelm (6389)
Journal of Eric Wilhelm (6389)
Bringing Perl to University
Jonathan Leto and I made a trip to Seattle to talk about Perl and The Perl Foundation's involvement with GSoC at a Google Summer of Code Infosession this week. The show-of-hands of students who have used Perl was only one or two out of about 25. My presentation included a very brief overview of TPF, Perl, the CPAN, Perl Mongers, YAPC, Perl 6 and Parrot (in under 10 minutes.) I guessed that most of these things might be completely foreign to a group of CS students, but the blank stares about the CPAN were particularly striking.
Apparently the CS curriculum does not cover version control, test-driven development, project planning, bugtrackers, external dependencies, and various other real-world issues. From talking to some of the students afterwards, they are getting exposed to algorithms and data structures, but only through Java. A few asked about my "Perl is multi-paradigmatic" comment (where I mentioned procedural, object-oriented, functional, and declarative programming.) The notion that you can come at the problem from a radically different direction was just as foreign as everything else I said. I got the impression that several students might have had Perl filed under "only does web stuff" (if they had heard much about it at all.) Hopefully we helped clear-up some misconceptions and spark some interest.
Please, go tell students in your area about Perl! It seems that the universities are neglecting to mention it.
help them think they understand.
--Larry Wall
Connexions? (Score:1)
What benefit do they have? (Score:2)
Is it only for the sake of broadening their knowledge?
It certainly does not seem to be a key requirement in most of the openings out there.
Some of the other real-world issues you mentioned seem to be much more important for someone looking for a job than Perl.
Are there any immediate benefits for a student in knowing Perl?
I am trying to think about this and the main thing I could come up is that with perl they could easily copy t
Re: (Score:1)
When I was still going to school I didn't learn Perl until my senior (last) year, but I wish I had learned it sooner. Not all of our classes required that the solution to a problem be written in a particular language. After I learned Perl I had several projects I wrote for my Networking and Software Engineering and I finished much quicker than those students who used C++, Java or C#.
Re: (Score:1)
Perl and CS Majors (Score:1)