[Melbourne-pm] Desktop environments

[Jacinta Richardson]

Kirrily Robert wrote:

> Is that the same across all your courses, from the introductory to the
> more advanced ones, or do you see the preferences shifting?

The vast majority of our courses are introductory.  The more advanced ones: OO 
Perl, Databases, Web Dev and Security just aren't easy to sell.

	"I already know Perl, I can just pick the rest up"
	"I'm just doing web development, I don't need to learn security, do I?"

	etc.

With web dev and databases we pretty much force the programmers to use our Linux 
box as setting up web servers and databases for each student on their Windows 
boxes has been too hard.  (We only get access to the machines 30 minutes before 
the class starts, and we'd have to install it on all of them!).  Security is 
still in seminar style, so it hasn't really mattered.

I'm not sure if our numbers would be statistically significant, but I think 
we've generally had about 50:50 for OO Perl.

>  And, do you
> have any feel for how many of your students are full-time Perl
> programmers vs how many might use Perl part-time in their jobs, for
> instance as sysadmins, and how many are working in a team of
> Perl/LAMP/etc developers as opposed to being a lone Perl programmer?

We get a full mix.  The following might be correct.

	20-30% of our attendees will be coding alone, or in a group of 2-3.
	20-30% of our attendees will be coding in a large team or department
		who are Perl savvy
	The rest are in varying size teams.

	40% are intending to use Perl for data processing of something, for
	the next while
	20% are system adminstrators
	20% have something to do with databases
	10% are planning to use Perl for web
	10% work in Canberra/for the government and thus can't tell us.  ;)

We don't record what our students are using Perl for, or what operating systems 
they're using it on.  We ask OS at the start of the course so that we can cover 
how to do the exercises, and focus so that we gain an idea of what examples are 
likely to work well.  However, to an extent the answers and proportions stay 
fairly much static.

All the best,

	Jacinta