Chris Nandor wrote:
>No, there isn't. It is not inherent at all. It has no actual meaning,
>and its value is entirely aribtrary, and therefore not inherent.
>
I guess I'm not too picky about whether value is arbitrary or inherent
(especially since my philosophy is that all value is ultimately
arbitrary) as long as there's value there.
>That's just the point: no one is being turned away. Just because we
>won't offer an incentive of entirely arbitrary value (IEAV), that is
>"turning people away?" Come now.
>
I'd suggest that refusing to take an action which does add value,
arbitrary or not, says that one should like Perl for its own sake rather
than what value it can have in ones life. In fact, I'd suggest that
claiming Perl should be certification-free is itself a form of imposing
an arbitrary value, which rather weakens the argument against certification.
>You miss the point: no certification is in any way valid, by definition.
>Any business depending on it will be wasting its time.
>
I guess I don't understand this. How does, for instance, a PE
certification damage engineering? How does passing the bar exam damage
law? How does being a member of the appropriate medical society (and the
certification, including putting those little letters on his nameplate)
make my prosthodontist less competent?
>Any certification will always 1. exclude people who know the technology
>well, and 2. include people who don't.
>
I'm not so certain of the first, though I'm pretty sure the second is
true. In fact, I think those two points are in tension.
>Therefore, it has no utility to
>a business. It has a perceived utility, but that perception is flawed.
>
I think the flawed perception is yours. What utility it has is
statistical. There aren't any absolute guarantees that someone is
competent, including the informal, ad-hoc certification (for lack of a
better word) that goes on in the interview process. It does, however,
help sort out the obvious losers, and that's a utility.
>Here's the bottom line: you can reasonably disagree with the business
>utility of certification. I can't agree that it is useful, because in
>every case I have seen, it is inherently flawed, and my brain tells me
>that it is therefore unuseful.
>
I agree that you can reasonably disagree on this, but I don't agree
that's what you're doing.
What you're saying is that something flawed is therefore unuseful, which
means Perl, which is flawed, is not useful.
>However, please don't gripe and moan to me about how I am turning people
>away or being elitist or any such nonsense. For years I have spent,
>unpaid, countless hours helping people learn perl, on mailing lists,
>BBSes, newsgroups, IRC, and in person. Stick to the issue, please.
>
Well, just to play devil's advocate here, let me argue that you _are_
practicing a form of elitism by doing just that. You're advocating a
form of Perl certification--namely, the ability to learn in the way you
like to teach--that produces Perl programmers of the sort you like. The
flip side of this is that you are discouraging the sort of Perl
programmers you don't like.
John A
