Re: [Boston.pm] (also) Perl

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 16:23:29 -0500, Andres Monroy-Hernandez
<andres-lRVC4ZOj03MXLHLbWYkSuw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> If any, I think O'Reilly should be the issuer of those certificates. I
> think it would be a nice thing to have for marketing purposes as others
> have pointed out.

O'Reilly is too aware of how influential people in the community feel
about certification to make that kind of mistake.  Else they would
have done it a long time ago.

If you really want a certificate, go to http://brainbench.com/ and
take their test.

> Another idea would be to use the PerlMonks ranking number as
> certificates :-)

Perlmonks rankings are a measure of how much you've
participated in Perlmonks, and not how good you are as a
programmer.  There is very little correlation between how
impressed I am with Perl people and their XP rating on
Perlmonks.

Furthermore when I make a Perl hire, your knowledge of
Perl is one of the least important things that I want to know.
I want to know how well you know databases, can read
documentation, understand various programming concepts
- none of which are addressed in a test of how well you
know arcane syntax for features that I'm not using.

That is, I'd prefer someone with the good taste to not do
something like @{[ code here ]} rather than someone who
is proud that they know how to interpolate code directly
into a string (but probably doesn't realize that they're
getting context wrong).  (Particularly when using
concatenation takes ONE more character, is faster, easier
to read, and gets context right.)

Cheers,
Ben