On Monday, April 29, 2002, at 03:55 , Peter Scott wrote:
> At 01:14 PM 4/29/02 -0700, drieux wrote:
>> On Monday, April 29, 2002, at 12:45 , Anthony Beaman wrote:
>>
>>> Bingo! I agree and I think that's my problem with all of this. I think
>>> that the documentation pages can be over a newbie's (myself) head.
>>
>> Part of that is understanding what the 'gliphs' are - if you
>> have no idea what a scalar or a list are - it is hard to grok
>>
>> 'list context' or 'scalar context'
>>
>> and hence have to 'learn' that some how....
[..]
> No point attacking them for failing to fulfill promises they don't make.
allow me to clarify that I am not at all attacking the perldocs
for failing to be more than they are, any more than I would take
on the man pages for being what they are..... since they do
not make any promise to be anything but what they are - arcane
annotations from one set of monks to another....
If anything the POD that comes with perl now is WAY better!!!
but still one has to get across certain key fundamental notions -
so that the FNG can get into the POD and read on their own which
had been the point of the kvetch...
> Learning is the province of books like the Llama - because tutoring is in
> general (a) more subjective and therefore subject to contentious
> arguments;
hence it is easier for most folks to say,
"I tried foo, it fried...."
to such places as this.... or worse, as I have taken the habit,
to bench mark and Idea - and see what happens - propose it around
to some folks.... and then go back to my lair and decide which
Druggie I trust...
> (b) more voluminous than reference works and (c) harder to do right,
> this is why you don't find much in the way of tutorials bundled with Perl.
My working theory is that if they have the essentials, by what ever means,
then the shorter reference guide and the time pounding out variations will
teach them more.... You know what works, and what is easier to do, because
you have the 'keyboard time'....
Along the way one also needs to read and review the POD of others - so
as to detect the bugs in their documentation - and propose corrections,
as well as to make sure that your own POD is kosher. We had the giggler
where the POD writer had tried to be 'general' - and someone tried to
run the 'generic' - and was confused by the error message
no new method found for class FOO::BAR::generic at line ...
So I learned from one who was cool enough to put the POD in such
a way that one merely cut and paste from the synopsis into the new
code and off one went.
I of course take the fascist attitude:
"It Ain't ready for release if it ain't got POD...."
since if there is no POD then pod2man fails.... and there are
no manpages for the code.... BAD....
> I happen to think it's somewhat ambitious to learn a new language from
> books alone, but that's just me... I prefer an instructor-led class where
> I can get it but that's not always possible.
I have nothing against 'instructors' - some people find them very
useful - it helps them 'interact' with the information in a less
threatening
experience.... Rather than having to jump up and run to your
backup network connection to ssh back in to kill off the code
that just scrambled up your GUI - due to some minor little gotcha....
I think I would have preferred to learn perl in '90/'91 based on
something a little more robust than merely the first edition
and comp.language.perl.... { those people were VICIOUS - at least
down in alt.flame, we had morals and scrupples } But we had to get
the stuff up and running, and finessing the point was not in the budget...
{ hiddeous sub_text - but O'reilly and the nutshell organization was
a lot smaller back then, and the 'net' was a much more personable
organization of basically isolated psychotic delusionals who were
better off figuring it out rather than loose on the streets.... So
now that kids have the 3rd Edition, et al, they should have an
instructor read to them???? }
>>> Personally, I'm on NT and am moving to Unix or Linux later (after I
>>> learn C and Assembly), so I'm using the Learning Perl on Win32.
>>
>> May I recommend that if you have no really pressing need to
>> understand the gory details of how bits are flipped in any
>> given specific CPU that you avoid the 'assembler' portion.
>
> It depends. IMHO everyone should learn at least one assembler so they
> have an idea of how CPUs think... makes it easier to understand how a
> higher-level language like C works and why it was designed the way it was.
Technically I agree with you. Since this provides the general
understanding of how we get from the mental construct of a
von neumann machine to a specific implementation of a given
CPU architecture. { and before you try it, give it up kids,
I actually turned in assembler code in High Gothic Fonts - been
done - so don't. }
But in the same vein one would also be arguing that people should
do the classic undergrad game of writing a cross compiler so that
they 'get it' about how compilers take text and turn it into binaries.
But that way also leads to asking that people remember Chomsky for
what he got his degree in, rather than what he is popularly known
to have written on....
{ hum... this way also leads to keeping them off the streets and
away from the paying customers... so you might have a point here... }
> *Kinda* like learning Latin makes it easier to learn other languages that
> were derived from it. Again, YMMV.
and when I can get paid to 'et tu brute' I will be more than
willing to give up kvetching the old school joke:
"conjugate the verb to spit,
'spiti, spitue, achtue splatus...'"
But technically this way leads us to the ongoing quest for what
really is 'software development' - and where does the need to
understand what is going on take precedence over merely pushing product!
Which of course is 'fine' for those of us who are listed in the
Org Chart as 'Software Engineers' - but is a bit foolish for the
rest of the 'members of IT Staff' who merely want to save their
souls and get to 'beer time'....
ciao
drieux
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