>>>>> "David" == David K Trudgett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
On Monday 2003-01-06 at 17:21:28 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> Namely, most of the senior development managers did NOT have any >> background in sys admin, so they didn't have a context in which to >> appreciate the language. The problem space they all worked in was >> one in which perl was NOT necessarily optimal. David> Do you think Perl 6 will be a language that _is_ "optimal" for David> many/most/all of those problem domains for which Perl 5 David> currently isn't? I don't know, because I haven't really followed perl6 development that closely, personally. However, I do think that perl6 will fare better when compared to Java, C++, D-flat (oops, I mean C-sharp ;-), etc., but at this point, its a purely academic argument, becuase there's not much to compare. But, at the end of the day, I don't really care what University CS course teach. Let me take this thread in a slightly diffent direction... Why don't I care? Because I work on Enterprise Infrastructure, designing, developng, deploying and maintaining *ULTRA* large scale systems. The best staff we have are the people with a strong background in hands-on systems administration. The best sysadmins, and among them, the best developers, almost all come from a non-CS background. (My own degrees are in Math and Physics, and *all* of my computer skills were self taught -- never taken a CS course in my life). My personal bias (and I make no claims that these statements are anything other than that -- my opinions, from my subjective viewpoint, with my biases), are that the best Enterprise Architects are NOT the CS-trained, hardcore application developers, they are the people with Real Experience building, operating, and maintaining a real, working system. The worst input on Enterprise Architecture tends to come from people with a "pure" development background. The ones who have never found themselves stuck in a comm room at 3AM trying to figure out why a critical system won't reboot after a hardware failure, or the admins who have to struggle with the network outages caused by runaway applications flooding the network and your monitoring systems with bogus traffic. Far too many "developers" are too far removed from the installation, configuration, and support of the software they write. That someone else problem. Well, those problems are the domain of the sys admin, and that's the skill set that really understands how to scale a working system. Now, in practice, almost all of the really good perl hackers I know in the sysadmin world are people like me: self-taught sysadmins, who learned by trial through fire, through real world experiences. So, while I would love to see perl more "accepted" in the academic world, I don't see that happening as long as the Dark Art of system administration is not more formally recognized by CS departments. Now, my first-hand experience with academia ended when I graduated (some would say escaped) from grad school in 1986... yeah, I'm an old man. The CS department treated us Math/Physics geeks with a near-complete lack of respect, but perhaps that's atypical. Maybe some of you with more recent experience in the academic CS world can comment on how the art of systems management/administration is respected (or not) today.
