Re: When to "use strict" when teaching?

From: Juha Laiho (Juha.Laiho_at_iki.fi)
Date: 02/02/04 

Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2004 18:22:00 GMT

Simon Andrews <simon.andrews@bbsrc.ac.uk> said:
>I'm thinking about putting together a a series of evening classes at
>work for a group of people who are interested in learning Perl. I'm
>just thinking about how to split things up and the best approaches to
>take. A couple of quetions presented themselves and I though I'd
>solicit opinions from others who have done this sort of thing before.

I haven't (been teaching Perl, that is), so don't put too much weight
on my words.

>1) When do you think it's best to introduce strictures into the programs
>people write. Many moons back I learnt Perl using Learning Perl, which
>I found to be excellent, but looking back I see that it doesn't
>introduce the concept of strictures into any of the basic exercises. I
>remember that adapting my programming to using strictures was one of the
>harder things I had to get my head around, and I wonder if it would have
>been easier to have started off by writing all programs under warnings
>(+diagnostics) and strict?

I think I'd try to get the students use warnings and strictures from the
start. But this depends on how much things your students allow as "just
do it this way", without questioning and/or requiring in-depth explanation.

I also had hard time when I moved to use strictures - and Perl wasn't
my first language.

>2) How much Perl do you reckon people can comfortably take in one
>sitting? I'm in the nice position of being able to spread the training
>in short sesssions over several weeks so that people don't get
>overloaded (most will never have done any programming before at all).

Here you have another challenge -- introducing people to the idea of
programming. This'll be the hard one, because you'll need to teach
at least some of the base abstractions:
- variables
- flow control (branching and looping)
- boolean logic (for controlling the above)
- modularity, reuse (subroutines)
- structured data (arrays, hashes)

>Most technical courses I've seen suffer from throwing too much
>information at people which results in them not retaining much of it. I
>was thinking of 1.5 hours at a stretch and maybe 10 sessions in total
>(with exercises in between), to give them a good introduction to the
>language.

That's not too much, but could be enough for basics. 

-- 
Wolf  a.k.a.  Juha Laiho     Espoo, Finland
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"...cancel my subscription to the resurrection!" (Jim Morrison)

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