[LA.pm] Anyone with a teaching bug?

[Todd Cranston-Cuebas]

Andy,
LOL I'm sorry, I just had to crack up. I haven't heard the word "suckage" in
a long time ;)

That being said, I can understand both sides of the argument. The perl
community has to be aware of a certain "reputation" and it doesn't help if
coders are using bad form, etc. On the other hand, I've argued for a good
long time that the perl community has a serious need to develop new talent
in just about any manner possible. Sometimes you need to just "hook" someone
on a simple example that helps them do something truly useful. From that
point on, they can grab onto books, additional training, etc. Simple, good
training doesn't necessarily have to be free though so I'm not going to get
into the argument of paid vs. free stuff.

I know that the php community in LA has been running extensive and truly
beginner classes on PHP and mySQL and graduate to more complex classes...
all for free. Ruby has extensive online courseware, learning videos, etc.
and clearly has an aim toward indoctrinating the masses. I can still
remember when perl was "the" choice for doing anything on the web and people
learned it to do mostly cgi work. From there, it grew, BUT the average
person was pulled to perl because it was the choice for the early web coder.
The argument could be made that something similar occurred to sysadmins
,etc. when perl was the defacto language for scripting. The world is
changing though. PHP, Ruby, and even Groovy are available for simple web
stuff. Sysadmins are relying more and more on python. In general, I applaud
any attempt to make perl accessible again.

Just my two cents. Suckage... that's just great ;)

todd

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 6:19 PM, Andy Lester <andy at petdance.com> wrote:

>
> On Sep 8, 2008, at 6:18 PM, Ben Tilly wrote:
>
>  You say that like it is always bad to point out suckage.
>>
>
>
> At the expense of enthusiasm, with nothing positive on the flip side, yes I
> do think it's always bad to "point out" suckage, which usually takes the
> form of rude comments that pretend that the listener isn't actually a person
> with feelings.
>
> --
> Andy Lester => andy at petdance.com => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance
>
>
>
>
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