On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 09:28 AM, John Saylor wrote:
hi
( 05.02.25 16:56 -0500 ) James Linden Rose, III:
Certification for Perl will certainly NOT raise the intellectual bar
of its practitioners, but it will certainly make many more people into
converts on both the programmer and the manager side of the equation.
converts to what- perl or certification?
If certification existed, more people would study Perl because they
would be able to obtain a piece of paper that proves they understand it
to some industry standard, and they could then use their certified
credentials to suggest Perl for real world problem solving. Presenting
3rd party evidence that they can indeed pull off their proposal is what
Perl needs. It would also allow managers who are not programmers to
feel more confident that Perl was a serious language that could
accomplish industrial strength tasks, and that the person presenting
himself to be hired has a requisite level of skill with Perl to be
trusted with the task. Without certification there is no way for the
non-programmer to judge if anyone presenting themselves as a Perl
programmer knows anything, and Perl looks very amateurish to the
uninitiated non-programmer when compared to languages with formal
certification and corporate support. In addition to the story I told
about my own company is a story from my old job at MIT. Our boss hired
an Israeli woman tasked with deciding on the next version of our
in-house data management system... I had to sit on many of the endless
meetings to discuss the system we needed, and when I approached her
about how wasteful I thought her spending plans were as I knew that
what we needed was quite simple and I could do it myself, she refused
to even discuss building any of the tools the office needed in-house
because Perl wasn't a real language in her mind, and my boss considered
her to be an "expert" since she knew that Java programmers were
certified professionals. They then blew $500,000 on a system I could
have built for free in my spare time in a fraction of the time (they
still haven't finished their system and about 7 years have gone by now
since the start of discussion), a system that they cannot maintain
without further expenditures of both time and money in perpetuity and
at a very great level of expense. Had they simply hired an in-house
Perl guy with even basic familiarity with the language they could have
built a vastly superior system faster and on the cheap - and she/he
could have been hired for less money than I was making. A Perl guy
could also have modified the system on-the-fly as the need arose in
near real-time instead of every few years having a two year committee
to decide what the next system should be able to do two years later.
I've never witnessed more wasteful decisions in my life, and almost
entirely because my suggestion to use a little Perl programming held no
weight in the minds of the blissfully ignorant. Perl is nearly
invisible in the non-IT professional world. All of which gets back to
my dummy theory of why certificates work.
People who currently pursue Perl in the absence of a certification
program, are a much more motivated group than what will results when
the masses seek out a coveted certificate... but are not any more
likely to be hired and asked to use their Perl skills to build the next
system at XYZ Company because of their superior motivation and
expertise. They will more than likely be hired because the manager
knows they have C++ or Java skills - and they will use their Perl
skills surreptitiously or after the fact (hiring). As I said, the
genius in the use of Perl will not improve via certificates, even
though the skills will be formally taught to a much larger body of
people. Certification will however allow Perl's possible use to
greatly broaden, and allow the next crop of Perl converts more latitude
and leverage to apply their Pearly skills. This will not directly
benefit, and will probably not motivate the current Perl gurus unless
they get involved with the certification process, become managers of
large Perl programs needing to hire Perl programmers, or obtain
certification themselves - which is a bit demeaning since it will not
distinguish the quality of the current batch from that of the putative
future batch.
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