On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 10:01:32AM -0500, Greg London wrote: > From a game-theory point of view, I think certification is an overall win. > The worst case scenario for certification would be that gurus have to > get their manager to pay for them to take the test. > > The worst case scenario for no certification would be that perl gets > replaced with some other language that has more programmers.
That is a gross oversimplification. There are oodles of ways certification is a net loss; I won't rehash them; they've been mentioned ad nauseum here and elsewhere. > Would you rather go through the trouble of taking a test to keep > programming in perl? Or would you rather there be no perl jobs at all? The number of perl jobs is one metric, but certainly not the only one, and definitely not the most important one. At the end of the day, all that matters is "can you get the job done?" There are a few variations on that theme, like "...on time?", "...on budget?", "...with X staff?", "...with X performance?", "...on X platform?", and so on. The number of Perl job openings today, during the boom, or during the bust is largely irrelevant. Java was supposed to be the programming languages to end all programming languages. It wasn't then, and it isn't now. Interestingly, the whole Java community seems to be slowly awaking from it's overcomplexification of programming, and developing lightweight systems (the kind of stuff that's natural to write with Perl). Over time, we've seen legacy systems ditched for Perl reimplementations, and Perl systems ditched for PHP, Java, C#, C, and other reimplementations. It's all cyclical. If Perl makes it easy to solve problems, it'll win. If not, it deserves a lesser status. Same as any other technology from Assembly Language to Z-machines. Z. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
