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.
Actyally, the "pure" developers are the ones who wrote
the code that won't reboot at 3am :-)
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.
When I worked at EDS there was one attempt to attach
the support budet to the people who released the code
version. The theory was that accountability was the
mother of caution -- or at least cleaner code. Woo...
was THAT movement stopmed out fast. The developers wanted
nothing to do with the code after it went into the real
world, especially not reports of bugs or feedback from
lowlife users.
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.
I don't think academics consider it a "dark art", just
irrelevant. Many of the programmers I've had to manage
simply consider reality to be irrelevant to the process
of designing code. In Secrets & Lies, Schneier quotes
Yogi Berra to describe security: In theory theory and
pratice are the same thing; in pratice they aren't. CS
departments are about teaching theory; SA's are about
pratice. Most teaching languages are about introducing
theory; Perl is about pratice. Hmmm... maybe I see a
pattern here
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.
In the same vein as physicists looking down on chemestry as
"just physics at STP", most math folk I've known look at
physics as "just applied math". One of them described Newton
as a "great mathamatician who wasted too much time on physics."
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.
I've seen a divide between CS and Comp. Eng. people: the
latter seem far more interested in reality and operating
systems. Funny, they also use/know more Perl. Maybe there
really is a pattern...
--
Steven Lembark 2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing Chicago, IL 60647
+1 773 252 1080
