Questions at the end.

The tall dude was just forced to grow up at work.

His boss did a doubletake, realized she hated perl, and it was
suddenly everywhere. It is now FORBIDDEN! And do NOT enhance
anything already done. And get RID of anything already done
as soon as possible.

No matter how productive.

It reminded her of me. They have a couple of core systems that
run their shop. I wrote both of them. 3 years later, she bitches
she wants to kill them and everyone else road bocks. Awwwww.

It would take less than 1 week for 1 individual to learn enough to
take ownership. I hired him, but he was reassigned.

His primary focus is C#. He's a hard core windows geek, but
open minded enough to look aside for input.

90% of the code I left behind was in C# dammit. 2 multi-tabbed
applications, lots of database interactions, and then scanned/printed
barcoded PDF forms for tracking.

It's was fun, but perfectly killable. My 2nd C# app. UGLY!
Go ahead, kill it already.

But they still use it. And she bitches. And hates it. It was mine.

Did I mention how much his boss hates me? She probably wakes up
screaming my name, and not in a good way.

So anyway, she forbids the Perl and tell him to rewrite everything in
C#.

He comes home furious. We have a nice discussion on how it is
good for his resume (and thought processes) to pickup multiple
languages.

They gave him a book budget, and a playtime budget, and access
to the guy I hired to replace me (on the Perl side) but is now
their #1 C# coder.

The C# guy gives him a lecture on how to do certain things, and says
multiple times how it would be really tough to do that in perl.

The boy responds with the easy quick implementation of whatever
the guy says would be difficult. The boy has only been coding
a couple of months, maybe 5 days hardcore. And he shows the
C# guy how easy it really is.

Doesn't matter. Forbidden. Ok, for each C# assignment, implement
in perl (if possible or desirable) for experience and library
building.

A very good place to be, and to learn, as long as the boss stops
dropping grenades into the playpen.

Did I mention he's going out with her daughter? Seriously.

Some day I might be sitting across the table from her at the wedding.

So last night we were having our evening relaxation period and he
looking at the new install of Liquid Lemur (Xfce) and checking out
some Gimp stuff (he's a heavy graphical user, both for desktop print
production tasks and his own art usage).

I mentioned how you can use the built in scripting language to
call pretty much anything the menu can do, and then some, to
automate any task within Gimp. He thought of it as a macro pushing
buttons.

No no no. A REAL language that can do anything the interface can do,
and then some. Not via the menu.

Here, it's called scheme, no more relaxation for you until you've
read and absorbed a single page of the tutorial. OK?

He agreed.

After about 10 minutes he started making very odd noises, and we
discussed. He was absorbed for the next hour.

Bottom line: HE LOVES IT!

The language, the syntax, the mathematical model that it implements,
he just loves it. It works like his brain.

On the way out this morning he mentioned rather than go full out
on scheme, he should really learn lisp.

And he wants a "real" development environment. This means interactive
debugging and incremental code compiling, at least to me.

1st question if you've read so far:

What is the best (if choices) development environment for lisp that is
free, and preferably works in Linux.

#2: Is there a smalltalk equivalent (or better)?

He had all these brilliant ideas about how he'd bury it.

I shot every single one down, not because they weren't technically feasible, but they were a directly fire-able offense.

When done, I detailed the politics of the issues (and the people 3 levels above him), and he came to the rational conclusion to take the year to build skills in anything he can, as long as it is either interesting or marketable. Things that interest him can be on "own time" at home, but the company owns his ass while he's there, and C# is marketable, and you can always blame MS when something fails.

He needs to recruit a 2nd that they trust to fill in for him if he wants
to write in perl. And then he goes through channels. But he buries NO
code. That's the evil programmer mentality, and I'd stop training him
if he develops it. Too limiting a world-view.

90% of teaching a perl programmer is forcing him to read the Tao of Programming and quizzing him on it, and then read the 1st several chapters of the AUP, and quizzing him on it, and really pounding in that other people were going to maintain this code. Some day. Every piece of code has a life, and it may outlive you.

Do NOT force the next guy to decode your brain state.

I would not allow him to code for about 3 days because he didn't do his homework. Allow is a bit strong, but when I refused to review his code, it sunk in.

So anyway, most never got this stuff beat into them, they whipped out some code, it seemed to work, and a new career was born.

He's decided to dive into Lisp for a bit and is working in the Eclipse environment. It annoys him when he is doing an exercise that he could just whip out in Perl. I told him to withhold judgment until he got all the fundamentals of the language.

Anyone here know Lisp? I sure don't.

It optimizes with knowledge of data flow history and code path transversal. A few passes of data and it can rewrite your core hot spots. CPUs just got fast enough that this type of optimization is possible in real time and people don't get annoyed by the initial "sluggish" moment while the overhead of the optimizer tanks the system.