Re:Teach the kids to program in Perl! (Score 1)

I have to agree with you here. Perl is a great programming language to get started on. It gives almost instant gratification (its amazing what you can do with just a very limited knowlage of the language. Especaly in the CGI programming arena) and coupling it with HTML gives the visual feedback that kids need to keep interest. There's also the "hey billy! go to http://insertaddress.com and check out what I just made" thing as an added bonus.

The nice thing about starting a kid out in programing by doing simple CGI's in perl is that to do something realy usfull and cool you don't need to know much of the language. For example the first program I ever wrote in perl was a script to read in a flat text file, pipe delimited database of names, e-mail addresses, etc. and display them on a webpage. At the time I had never programmed in any language (exept HTML if thats loosly considered a programming language) but all I needed to know to implement that was how to read in a file, split up the fields and use print to insert them into the page. Just a few lines of code, a simple format, no high level consepts to work out, but it gave instant gratification and feedback. That small script was what gave me the confidence and the drive to actualy sit down and start learning how to do more complex tasks.

The thing is a kid isn't going to find anything interesting about printing out "Hello World!" a million times or even learning how to do more complex tasks at a command line (and as for basic that language should be allowed to rot and die off in a corner somewhere...we were all forced to learn it in school and we hated it so why punish our kids the same way). They need some kind of visual feedback and the ability to show off there hard work that can get them worked up and encurage them to keep at it. The combination of HTML and perl is a perfect starting point that provides a lot of growing room.

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