•Re: Convincing co-workers to learn Perl

[merlyn]

I brought a lot of people into the Perl camp a dozen years ago by answering questions in comp.unix.questions with both a shell answer and a Perl answer. The Perl answer was almost always shorter and easier to read, and almost always faster as well.

Perhaps you can do the same. Say "here's how to solve that in $LANGUAGE_X, but the Perl solution looks like this...". Do it enough times, they'll get the hint.

These days, the big winner seems to be the CPAN. So if you're in some $LANGUAGE_X design meeting, and someone mentions some basic task, just mutter "you know, I bet there's a freely available CPAN module for that part of the problem". Even if there isn't, they'll eventually get the hint.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

[l2kashe]

Nice response..

I was thinking something along the same lines, but closer to how the Llama introduced perl.. Something along the lines of

Here is how you do X in Y
Here is the same in vanilla Perl
Here is the same in chocolate Perl
Here is the same in a bananasplit with nuts, cherries, and hot fudge Perl

This way they can grasp the basic flow, then you show them slight improvements on the algorithm in question, then move to builts ins, and using $_ or assuming you are working on $_, etc..

Best of luck on your conversion process..

/* And the Creator, against his better judgement, wrote man.c */