[ww-devel] Making Perl modules available

[William Wheeler]

Dear Andrew,

Davide is a Prof. of Mathematics at Union College. 
Here is a link to his homepage in the Mathematics Department there:

   http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/

He does have extraordinary coding skills and a long history thereof.
He wrote the Math Objects programs for WeBWorK.  He was the author
of jsMath.  He is one of the co-authors of MathJax.

He has, I think, a partial appointment with the MAA to oversee
WeBWorK.  But his main activity is his Mathematics at Union College.

---

Almost all of WeBWorK has been written by mathematicians and their
students (some of whom have gone on to become professional computer
scientists).  With perhaps one or two exceptions, there are
no "pros" doing coding in WeBWorK.

---

I'll be in Bloomington for two more days this week.  Then I'll be back during
the latter part of July if you would like to speak to me in person.
I'm a bit rusty on some of the WeBWorK code, but I might be able
to help some.

Sincerely,

Bill

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Tue, 30 Jun 2015, Andrew Dabrowski wrote:

>
>
> On 06/29/2015 07:44 PM, Davide P. Cervone wrote:
>>> A related question:  There are a number of functions in List::Util that 
>>> would be useful in writing problems.  Most have been reimplemented in 
>>> PGauxiliaryFunctions.pl, but would there be a security risk in adding 
>>> List::Util to the real server?
>> I don't see anything that would be a security risk, but there are some 
>> things that might be issues for PG problems.  A number of the functions 
>> take code blocks (like the sort does), and these use variables $a and $b 
>> that are not localized, if I recall correctly.  This could interact badly 
>> with problems that use $a and $b as coefficients or other variables (many 
>> problems do).
> I see, I didn't think anything that CS101 would be a problem.  :(
>> This is one reason that the perl sort function is replaced by PGsort in PG.
> I do think that a number of the utility functions in List::Util, like sum and 
> reduce, should have been given the same treatment.
>> 
>> I'm happy to include additional perl modules when they add significant 
>> functionality; but my impression is that List::Util are basically 
>> convenience routines that could all be handled fairly readily "by hand" 
>> either in perl directly, or through a macro file that doesn't require 
>> additional modules.
> Sure, but I take it that you're a professional.  Many of us are math 
> educators who are only amateur coders, and I would rather use a utility, even 
> a very simple one, that's been tested and debugged over years by pros - 
> there's no obvious upper bound on the stupidity of my code.
>
>> Davide
>> 
> -- 
> Andrew Dabrowski   || ...my suspicion is that the universe is
> Indiana University || not only queerer than we suppose, but
> Swain East 117     || queerer than we can suppose. -JBS Haldane
>
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