On 2001.05.03, Alan Wright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Businesses really value people who have a hybrid set of skills and are > able to make projects happen - specifically NOT just from a technical > point of view. [...] Nevertheless I do not intend to ignore Java > because I have the 90% and will probably need the 10% to express > myself at some point in the future! Very well said, Alan. I think fundamentally we agree -- Java certainly has its place, and if companies can adopt Java, then their costs will continue to decrease as the labor pool expands, which is a very good thing for business. As for needing that 90%, I certainly agree that's what differentiates an expensive developer from an inexpensive one, but how do people go about cultivating those skills? Choosing to work in an environment or with tools that offer you a level of abstraction away from the lower-level "dirty bits" discourages people from having a good understanding of how things "really work" -- most people are under too much time pressure to develop a deeper understanding than what's ultimately necessary to do their jobs well enough to be happy. To put my money where my mouth is, I highly doubt that most people have any idea what the actual implementation details are behind EJBs and how code interacts with them -- mostly because in order to use them, you don't NEED to know. And, once you start getting into bean-managed persistence and object-relationship mapping, newbie developers don't even need to know basic principles of serializing data to a persistent store or taking an object and serializing it to a relational database. While, again, you don't NEED to know these things to "do your job", knowing will make you a more valuable developer ... so, where do folks learn this kind of stuff if all they get paid to do is use implementations of it? Java, like AOLserver and Tcl, have their place. Thankfully, I've chosen to learn AOLserver and Tcl as a venue to pick up skills I normally wouldn't if I'd gone the Java route ... - Dossy -- Dossy Shiobara mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Panoptic Computer Network web: http://www.panoptic.com/
