Perl as a First Language

Nov 16, 1999 by Nathan Torkington

Teaching Perl to First-Time Programmers

One of the criticisms often leveled against Perl is that it’s too big and too complicated for people who haven’t programmed before. Simon Cozens disagrees. He teaches Perl to first-time programmers, and says, “Perl is an ideal first programming language.”

Cozens is a linguist who has taught both formal and informal classes in Perl to people with a range of programming experience. He found that beginning programmers took quickly to Perl because “it allows you to express yourself naturally.” For instance, the automatic conversion between string and numeric types is what non-programmers expect: the string "3" doesn’t mean 51; it means 3. And if you add "4" to it, you expect to get "7" back.

“Take the implicit things in Perl, like <> and $_. They can be more of a bonus than it might appear, and that’s because of the way people think. We use implied objects like ‘it’ to describe what we’re doing, rather than spelling out things like ‘the variable’ explicitly every time.”

Even things like regular expressions work well for beginners, says Cozens. “They’re wonderful because people don’t think of text or data in character-by-character terms. They see the whole lot at once, and they look for patterns in the string; that’s the way the brain operates. Regular expressions work the way people do; you quite naturally say things like, ‘I want to find these characters, but only at the beginning of the string,’ or ‘Find three numbers, a space, and three letters,’ and these translate very easily into regular expressions.”

When asked whether any parts of Perl caused problems for beginners, Cozens replied, “There’s nothing about Perl that is difficult to understand if presented appropriately; the difficulty is presenting some of the concepts in an appropriate way, and that’s a question about how good the teacher is, not the language.

“For instance, references don’t have to be hard. You can make them hard, but not if you talk about putting more than one value into a hash and leading on from there. There’s no need to talk about pointers to areas of storage and all that sort of thing – we’re not teaching C, we’re teaching Perl.

“Scoping is also tricky because Perl gives you the choice of whether you want to write good, efficient code, or sloppy, hurried code. I tend to bring in use strict early on because it encourages people to really think about what they’re doing with their variables.”

Cozens firmly believes that Perl should be a first programming language. “Oh, absolutely! It’s ideal because it’s a real-world language, unlike one designed specifically for teaching, such as BASIC (Visual or otherwise). It’s a high-level language that deals naturally with natural concepts like strings and lines of text, unlike something like C; and it allows easy data and text manipulation without a tortuous syntax, unlike something like Python or Tcl. In fact, I don’t know if there’s a better first programming language.”

Cozens is so impressed with Perl for first-time programmers that he’s writing a book, Beginning Perl, to be published by Wrox Press. Says Cozens, “It’s aimed at both current programmers and first-timers alike; it should be accessible to everyone – I’m taking a lot of time to make sure it’s not too fast-paced but also not too patronizing to those who already know what a variable or a subroutine is. Look out for it in January 2000!”