At 5:15 PM +0000 3/14/00, Peterson, Jonathan wrote:
>It is a feature of Perl that it operates at a wide range of levels in a
>wide problem space.
A mild understatement, that...
I have been programming for some thirty years, using interpretive
languages (e.g., awk, icon, lisp, and shell) pretty regularly for
most of that time. I also developed and taught a course on Unix
scripting languages. In short, I'm a good candidate for Perl.
I picked up Perl a few years ago when I found that my production
shell scripts were taking three hours each to run. (Translating
them to Perl cut the time to a half-hour. :-) I also edited (and
wrote parts of) "MacPerl: Power and Ease", which got four camels.
So, one might assume that I'm a real Perl guru, easily capable of
passing any reasonable certification test. As it happens, I don't
believe this to be true. I use those parts of Perl which I need
for a given task, learning new parts only when the familiar ones
don't suffice.
I don't think I am particularly unusual in this regard. Perl is a
BIG language, more like Ada or PL/I than Fortran or even COBOL. A
programmer in such a language can get lots of work done and still
stay in modest subsets of the language.
This brings me to the problem I have with certification. Although
the studying I would need to do to get certified in Perl would let
me know about more parts of the language, there is no guarantee I
would end up being a better programmer. Nor would certification
tell a prospective employer all that much about my skills.
The one thing that certification might tell someone is that I have
a passing familiarity with all parts of Perl. Thus, if I needed
to read someone else's Perl code, I wouldn't need to consult the
Camel quite so often. I'm not sure, however, that this is a good
enough reason to institute standards which are know in advance are
likely to be misleading. ("It ain't what you don't know that will
hurt you as much as the stuff you do know that's wrong.")
-r
--
Rich Morin: [EMAIL PROTECTED], +1 650-873-7841, http://www.ptf.com/~rdm
Prime Time Freeware: [EMAIL PROTECTED], +1 408-433-9662, http://www.ptf.com
MacPerl: http://www.macperl.com, http://www.ptf.com/ptf/products/MPPE
MkLinux: http://www.mklinux.apple.com, http://www.ptf.com/ptf/products/MKLP
