YAPC::EU 2010 - The Renaissance of Perl - Mentoring Perl Beginners: Tales from Coaching Colleagues

Mentoring Perl Beginners: Tales from Coaching Colleagues

By Smylers from northwestengland.pm
Date: Friday, 6 August 2010 10:00
Duration: 20 minutes
Target audience: Any
Language: English

People new to Perl often see it quite differently from those of us who've been using it for years. Recently I've been mentoring some Perl beginners, developers who have joined our team with with experience in a variety of languages but none in Perl.

This has been an enlightening experience all round, something which this talk hopes to convey.

It covers some of the stumbling blocks, and which aspects of Perl the converts found themselves grappling with first. This led to teaching things in a quite different order from traditional Perl books and courses, and the talk examines why this may be.

The talk also looks at the impact of related non-Perl technologies on the mentoring — how much was spent dealing with things such as editors, shells, and databases.

Hopefully this talk will make you think about how ‘outsiders’ see Perl, contemplate whether the Perl community should be doing anything differently, and perhaps inspire you to consider hiring a non-Perl developer for your Perl team (or to vow never to do so!).