[Courses] Perl list active

[Akkana Peck]

Jacinta Richardson writes:
> A few people have contacted me off list and asked whether I'll be covering how
> to program.  I haven't given this a lot of thought, but rather than just
> replying individually with the same thing I thought I'd summarise my thoughts
> about that here.

Are there a lot of people interested in a course in how to program?
How about if it was in another language: Python or Javascript?
If so, which of those two languages would you prefer?

If there's a lot of interest, I could give a few intro lessons on
programming basics before Jacinta starts her Perl course in July,
but Perl isn't really my language. I've done a little in Perl, but
not enough to teach it (I'll be following Jacinta's course since
I'm sure I'll learn new and interesting stuff).

For those not familiar with the tradeoffs of various languages:
Python has an especially clean syntax and is very easy to learn.
It's great for quick programs run from the command-line, but you
can write big graphical apps with it too.
Javascript isn't quite as clean, but it runs in the browser so you
can use it to run scripts inside web pages, and that makes it easy
to show off your JS hacks to your friends or the world.

	...Akkana