

Teaching Perl to Undergraduates  - Phra
http://onionstand.blogspot.com/2011/02/teaching-perl-to-undergraduates.html

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bigiain
"Perl is an amazing programming language. And, with its growing worldwide re-
popularization"

Have I missed something? I'd kinda like this to be true, Perl is still my go-
to language when I need to hack something together - not because I think it's
necessarily "the best" language to do most jobs, but because I know it's "the
best" language for _me_...

Has everybody _else_ figured that out too? ;-)

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wyuenho
"Perl is an amazing programming language. And, with its growing worldwide re-
popularization"

Just because this guy says it is so, doesn't make it is so. Tell me _1_ metric
that tells me definitively Perl is coming back. If this guy told me Perl is
never going away, I'd believe him, but when he told me Perl is _coming back_ ,
with no data to back it up but his ass, and use that as an excuse to brain-
wrap the next generation of programmers to think in an alien language that
looks like comic characters cursing with $_@qw()<>$@{}*&lc()~>>>$.$/$<$:, I'd
brand it as a trash.

~~~
rquirk
<http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl> The downwards trend seems to be
flattening off, maybe "it's losing popularity at a slower rate" would have
been more accurate? Seems pretty cruel teaching undergrads Perl when they
could learn Python.

~~~
bellaire
This was done as a free summer course. Language bigotry aside, offering a
course to learn another language outside those taught in the standard
curriciulum, especially one which costs students nothing, is a win for
everyone.

~~~
wyuenho
If I offered you free cyanide but I told you it's candy, it's that a win too?

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buckwild
I hope he makes the students code. Teaching any student anything without the
student understanding the need for it is probably not a good idea.

Thinking back to my undergraduate mindset, I am sure I wouldn't care about
what is being said at lecture unless it was practically applicable to
something I was currently working on. Just my two-bits.

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jmah
Btw slides aren't in English (and download is disabled, what's up with that?).

