Perl class at the JC

[Sean Kirkpatrick]

Thanks to you all for your delightfully amusing but utterly irrelevant 
commentary on what is certainly the *least* most significant part of the 
process. I can't tell you when I've laughed so hard. You must understand 
though that the Title V outlines for most of the courses offered by the 
JC are written by and for folks who have one thing in mind: the 
administration and management of the institution, and not the delivery 
of educational content. Sometime over a beer (you're buying, of course), 
I'll tell you just how bogus it all is. ( "...theory as it relates to 
practice..." - what the hell does *that* mean?)

I offer you all the following:

1)    If you do have some serious suggestions about how to improve the 
course, please let me know. As an adjunct faculty member who receives no 
compensation for the extra duties of improving *actual* coursework, I 
find it nonsensical in the extreme to create extra work for myself by 
revising Title V descriptions that only serve to make some PhD or VP all 
squishy inside. However, I am always willing to incorporate new ideas 
and suggestions to make the educational content better and more 
relevant. I especially appreciate these suggestions from those who are 
actually working in the field, and not just collecting degrees.

2)    Consider the possibilty of putting your knowledge where your 
attitude is by enrolling, and then offering to *teach* a class or two. 
You may (or may not) be a hell-of-a-programmer, but do you have what it 
takes to keep a class of widely disparate abilities entertained and 
learning? My last Perl class had an age range of 20 (she actually 
skipped class one night to go to her 21st b-day party!) to 60, novices 
with 1 semester of programming to sysadmins, including 2 "Managers". 
Some of them were actually *interested* in CGI with perl. Can you imagine?

3)    Do remember that this is an "introduction to" and not a graduate 
level course in Object Oriented Programming in Perl. (The _sensibility_ 
of doing OOPerl - just because you can doesn't mean that you should - is 
another topic, and we'll debate that over the second beer that you're 
going to buy me.)

4)    Does it *really* matter whether it capitalized or not? Life is far 
to short to fight meaningless battles (though it appears that W is 
clueless on this point also). OTOH, if you're truly serious about your 
windmills, there is a new translation of Don Quixote published recently. 
I've heard that it's quite good.

See you next week, or not.

    Sean

Mike Wong and several others wrote:

>Or maybe he's invoking the Pathalogically Eclectic Rubbish Lister form
>of Perl. In which case, I'd say that the course description very much
>qualifies.
>
>On the other hand, it leads me to wonder who would be interested in CGI
>programming post-web boom. My own suspicions (backed by a recent
>experience) leads me to believe that the candidate will likely be an MIS
>majour. IMHO, MIS majours are interested in CGI from a reduce-IT-costs
>business point-of-view and not interested in the technology or the
>culture (or such minour things as implementation and accuracy). Their
>only interest in technology is that some of these poor souls believe
>that they will be qualified to manage technical people after taking a
>few courses.
>
>I suspect that the description has been written to appeal to such
>people, who don't like reading and thinking, but do like telling others
>what technology to use. I wonder what this means for the JC's agenda?
>
>- m.
>
>On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 14:51, Kevin Bingham wrote:
>  
>
>>DESCRIPTION
>><snip>
>>PERL is a programming language for writing CGI applications. It's main 
>>strength is that it doesn't have any unnecessary warnings or strictures. It 
>>is a direct descendent of Perl, a programming language which was used 
>>mainly by programmers. However, the original language required too much 
>>reading and thinking and so PERL was developed as a language which was more 
>>in tune with the requirements of the Internet age.
>></snip>
>>
>><ROTFLMAO>
>>
>>
>>-Kevin
>>
>>At 02:36 PM 1/5/2004 -0800, Tom Anderson (Thomas H) wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Perhaps he intends to use the Inline::PERL module.
>>>
>>>Check out
>>>http://search.cpan.org/~jmcnamara/Acme-Inline-PERL-0.01/PERL.pm
>>>
>>>"It should work perfectly the first time" -toma
>>>
>>>-Tom
>>>
>>>Gene Boggs wrote:
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>>CIS 54.31  Perl & CGI
>>>>>6675    T        6:00pm- 8:00pm         KIRKPATRICK
>>>>>
>>>>>Description:    An introduction to PERL (program extraction report
>>>>>language) which is used to create common gateway interface (CGI) scripts
>>>>>for use in Internet web sites. Emphasis will be placed on theory as it
>>>>>relates to practice. Students will create original Perl scripts from the
>>>>>Internet which they will revise. Lab emphasis will be placed on
>>>>>incorporating the Perl scripts into an existing web site.  (Credit course
>>>>>for grade or CR/NC)
>>>>>          
>>>>>
>>>>A couple problems here:
>>>>
>>>>1) PERL is not written in ALL CAPS because..
>>>>
>>>>2) ..it is not an acronym and hasn't been quite a few years now.
>>>>
>>>>3) Also that is the wrong acronym anyway.  It's actually "Practical
>>>>extraction and reporting language".
>>>>
>>>>This makes me wonder about the quality of such a course when the
>>>>description is not even close with respect to such simple little
>>>>things.
>>>>
>>>>-Gene Boggs
>>>>Software engineer and pedantic Bastard
>>>>        
>>>>