🔒 Perl 🐪 Weekly #743 - Writing Perl with LLMs | Sichere Programmierung

Perl 🐪 Weekly #743 - Writing Perl with LLMs

Originally published at Perl Weekly 743 Hi there, Last week I went to a small conference on "Teaching Computer Science in the era of AI/LLMs" hosted at The…

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Originally published at Perl Weekly 743

Hi there,

Last week I went to a small conference on "Teaching Computer Science in the era of AI/LLMs" hosted at The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. It was very interesting to hear how at various institutions, for example at the Technion, at the Tel Aviv University and at Ben Gurion University the lecturers feel the need to change things as LLMs can now implement basically everything at the level of a CS student in a BSc program. How do you teach them to actually learn the syntax? How much should you let them use LLMs for the assignments and during the exams?

I personally teach a course at the Weizmann Institute of Science to Master's and Phd students of Biology and Life Sciences. I think 15 years ago there was a course in Perl, but now this is in Python. It is very different from teaching CS students. My students use the language a lot more to write one-time programs to analyze some data and most of them don't see themselves as 'programmers'. So they are way less interested in syntax, or 'good code'. They mostly want to get nice graphs.

It is quite clear that giving them well written assignments is rather pointless. They can just put the assignment in an LLM and get the result. So what can be done?

As the semester starts this coming Sunday I really need to figure out how and what to teach them. Should I basically teach them prompt engineering?

Related to this I'd love to hear from you - either in an email or better yet in a blog post - on how do you use LLMs to write code? Especially Perl code. Which LLMs do you use? How do you make your prompts better? Anything special to Perl code?

What would you recommend to fellow Perl developers, how to best use LLMs while writing Perl code?

I know we are all still trying to figure this out, but learning from each other could make this process easier.

Enjoy your week!

--

Your editor: Gabor Szabo.

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