This course will only spend maybe a month on each language, so I don't expect them to walk out with a professional/employable level of fluency in any one of the languages.
I tell them at the beginning of the course "If your [prospective or current] employer asks whether you know Language X, the correct answer is 'No, but I will next week.'" This course is intended to give them practice learning new languages and putting them into the context of the world of programming languages, as well as to expand their minds with programming techniques that you couldn't already do in 1965 Fortran :-)
I've written some perl-based Web server scripts too, and always felt as though it was purely trial and error: I never developed a mental model that enabled me to predict what the language would do with any given string of source code. Which means either the language is too complex, or I'm too stupid. In either case, I didn't want to do perl.
And JCL is right out :-) (Yes, I studied JCL the spring of my freshman year, retching all the while....)
no subject
I tell them at the beginning of the course "If your [prospective or current] employer asks whether you know Language X, the correct answer is 'No, but I will next week.'" This course is intended to give them practice learning new languages and putting them into the context of the world of programming languages, as well as to expand their minds with programming techniques that you couldn't already do in 1965 Fortran :-)
I've written some perl-based Web server scripts too, and always felt as though it was purely trial and error: I never developed a mental model that enabled me to predict what the language would do with any given string of source code. Which means either the language is too complex, or I'm too stupid. In either case, I didn't want to do perl.
And JCL is right out :-) (Yes, I studied JCL the spring of my freshman year, retching all the while....)