UNIX/scripting/programming courses?

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 12:01:01PM -0400, Grant M. wrote:
> I would much rather see something like Perl or Ruby. These are languages
> that you can get for free on pretty much any platform, and they are
> somewhat forgiving. In that sense, I think the student can have an
> opportunity to learn to program _well_, while still learning to just
> program. Perl also offers a pretty straight forward entry-level syntax,
> as well as the opportunity to learn a more advanced level of use.

Language war risk here...

I have heard good things about Ruby, but don't really know much about
it.  For more pure Computer Science types something like Haskell might
be mind opening.  There seems to be so little real innovation in
computer science these days, teaching something beyond the current
buzzword-compliant vocational languages seems wise.

In the practical-yet-elegant category, Python should be mentioned.
The language itself is pretty small and mostly clean, which seems like
a good place to start teaching; and it is practical: it is available
on many platforms, it has big libraries that are powerful.

Where Perl is proud to offer the programmer many choices, all those
options might be a disservice to the beginner, and in courses where
instructors grade assignments, unlucky students might be penalized for
not using the instructor's favorite features.

-kb