Re: Any experience on teaching Perl programmers Java
On 10/24/2011 5:07 PM, saxo123@gmx.de wrote:
I lately applied for quite an ineresting Java job. It turned out that
I would also have to teach Perl programmers Java. Now, there's the
rub... I once had to teach SAP developers Java. That was a little
nightmare. The SAP programmers were not all interested, had basically
no interest in computer science as such. Worst of all the boss thought
Java was something like SAP just from a different manufacturer and
everybody could learn it like SAP itself. I fear this could turn out
the same again with teaching Perl programmers Java ...
I'll admit that I don't really know Perl (I can muddle my way through
reading it, but I have no hope of writing it anytime soon), so I'm
probably more liable to grasp at stereotypes than honest truths.
My first thought of Perl is that it is often used for "little" scripts
(e.g., a script that looks through a log file to find more useful data).
I do know that it has some vague object-oriented features, but I believe
that this feature lacks things like virtual methods and inheritance that
are normally associated with object-oriented paradigms.
I suspect that you will most notably find grousing about explicit static
typing, as opposed to Perl's implicit duck typing. To a lesser degree,
people may grouse about Java needing to put methods in classes. It is
possible (I'm really bordering on stereotype here) that your Perl
programmers may grouse about how much more difficult it is to do textual
manipulation in Java compared to Perl, particularly in the difficulty of
handling stdin and running regexes.
--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth