Re: Any experience on teaching Perl programmers Java
On Oct 25, 11:48 am, saxo...@gmx.de wrote:
thanx for the replies. What I'm wondering about most is whether
typical Perl people out there in the companies are mentally awake and
will show interest in learning new things. That kind of question is a
bit tentative, I admit.
It's also something which we cannot answer. In ignorance of the real
pupils you have we can only offer speculation and prejudice. That
would only make things worse. Better enter the training with an open
mind and find out who they are and what they expect from the
training. Then adjust accordingly.
My experience with SAP people was somewhat
negative there. SAP is a data maintenance system, basically a
programming layer on top of a SQL database with predefined business-
oriented modules for accounting, credit business, hr, stockkepping,
etc. The SAP programming language is somewhat an extension to SQL on
an Algol-68 like language level. Now, that was mean, but basically
correct.
Now Perl is surely on a higher level than ABAP, but you can live a
quite life as long as you know how to convert data streams with Perl.
No more interest in computer science is required then to get that kind
of job done.
Unfortunately that seems to be the case for many Java programmers as
well. I do not think that attitude depends on programming language.
Maybe it's the other way round (i.e. people with certain attitudes
pick specific languages) but even that is speculation and won't help
you because your group could be totally different.
And that kind of people will not be able to get into
something like Java and all the tools and libraries where you need to
have an interest in computer science as such. Otherwise you ran mad,
because of all the things that pop up new every year and you then have
to learn as well.
CPAN is also quite large and I don't think that you can get away with
only a few core library functions throughout your Perl life.
As I said: better find out who you are dealing with than try to create
expectation and press real people into that frame. Imagine this forum
would agree that Perl programmers are stupid and dumb: you would be
preoccupied and have insulted them already the very moment you enter
classroom. I do not think there would be a successful teaching and
learning experience with such a start - at least it's a lot harder
than otherwise.
In any case I believe it to be important to come to a common agreement
on what the purpose of the course is. It won't help if you want to
teach CS topics but people are more interested in learning how to
solve particular problems. If people are not interested to learn
though, then teaching anything will be hard and you will first have to
build up motivation.
Kind regards
robert