As some of you may know, I'm in the business of running perl training courses, and I'm spending much of my time working on course notes before they start. (The notes will be released under the OPL so everyone can enjoy them.) Many of the courses are based upon the old Netizen training manuals (for those who are familiar with them), although there's an equally large amount of material I'm developing from scratch.
The reaction to the courses has been great, a lot of people have expressed interest in them. However I've been really surprised by the reaction of people thinking of attending (or being told by their company that they will attend) the course on Object Oriented Perl.
Potential attendees who haven't had much programming experience, and haven't really used OO elsewhere, seem to have the attitude of "OO is a waste of time, I've never used it before, why should I learn it in Perl? Perl's a language for getting the job done, not screwing around with class diagrams." I've met people who've been falling over themselves to learn Perl, but recoil in horror the moment I mention OO.
I've had a few experienced perl programmers tell me they don't want to learn OO-perl, because OO-perl is difficult to understand, difficult to code, difficult to maintain, and just plain weird. I found that opinion a little odd, because they were all problems I found OO-perl did a good job in solving. Perhaps there's been a few people burning their fingers with OO-perl, or maybe those people who have are very vocal about it... On the other hand, perhaps OO-perl is difficult and yukky, and I can't see the wood for the trees because I spend so much time working with it.
The best reactions to the concept of learning OO-perl have come from people already experienced with other OO languages, such as java or python. The attitude there seems to be "we know that OO-perl is different, but we want to know how and why." There's real curiosity there, which is pleasing to see. Unfortunately, most potential attendees seem to fall into one of the categories mentioned in the paragraphs above.
Now, I'm working on "correcting" the people who have broken world-views, but I was wondering if these sort of attitudes are particularly widespread, because it feels to me that they are.
Just some food for thought while waiting for my espresso machine to warm up. :)
Cheers,
Paul