Re: Perl Advocacy w.r.t Teaching

[Anonymous Monk]

Why did you tell him he should learn Perl? I don't get the impression Perl is used a lot in the games industry. Running speed is quite important for many of todays popular games, and Perl isn't suitable to get the best running times. Perl favours development time - but in games, the trade off between runtime and development time lies more towards runtime.

As for Perl used to learn programming with - I don't think it's a suitable language. One doesn't use supercars or trucks to learn driving with - nor does one learn flying in an F16.

Perl is a rich language. It has many operators, functions and syntax constructs. And while that's good for many programmers, it distracts when teaching programming.

Look at the Wolf book (Mastering Algorithms with Perl). It suffers from the same problem. It tries to teach algorithms, but instead of focussing on the algorithms, time and time again, it takes detours to explain syntax, or to show a neat trick.

I've taught students how to program. I've taught Perl as well. I wouldn't dream of using Perl to learn people to program. Pascal, Java, Python, Modula, Haskell, all languages suitable as a first language. But not Perl.

[hardburn]

Running speed is quite important for many of todays popular games, and Perl isn't suitable to get the best running times.

Not as much as you'd think. The heaviest processing (graphics) is often done by the OpenGL library or a special language (like Cg), which offloads the work onto the GPU. Any language that can interface with OpenGL will work.

Try loading up a 3D-heavy modern game and keep track of your CPU load. I often see my CPU at 20-50% usage, because all the real work is being done on the GPU.

This will likely be more irrelevent as multi-core CPUs are introduced into the mainstream, since high-level languages often make it easier to take advantage of concurrent processes.