On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 09:28 AM, John Saylor wrote:
hi
( 05.02.25 16:56 -0500 ) James Linden Rose, III:Certification for Perl will certainly NOT raise the intellectual bar of its practitioners, but it will certainly make many more people into converts on both the programmer and the manager side of the equation.
converts to what- perl or certification?
If certification existed, more people would study Perl because they would be able to obtain a piece of paper that proves they understand it to some industry standard, and they could then use their certified credentials to suggest Perl for real world problem solving. Presenting 3rd party evidence that they can indeed pull off their proposal is what Perl needs. It would also allow managers who are not programmers to feel more confident that Perl was a serious language that could accomplish industrial strength tasks, and that the person presenting himself to be hired has a requisite level of skill with Perl to be trusted with the task. Without certification there is no way for the non-programmer to judge if anyone presenting themselves as a Perl programmer knows anything, and Perl looks very amateurish to the uninitiated non-programmer when compared to languages with formal certification and corporate support. In addition to the story I told about my own company is a story from my old job at MIT. Our boss hired an Israeli woman tasked with deciding on the next version of our in-house data management system... I had to sit on many of the endless meetings to discuss the system we needed, and when I approached her about how wasteful I thought her spending plans were as I knew that what we needed was quite simple and I could do it myself, she refused to even discuss building any of the tools the office needed in-house because Perl wasn't a real language in her mind, and my boss considered her to be an "expert" since she knew that Java programmers were certified professionals. They then blew $500,000 on a system I could have built for free in my spare time in a fraction of the time (they still haven't finished their system and about 7 years have gone by now since the start of discussion), a system that they cannot maintain without further expenditures of both time and money in perpetuity and at a very great level of expense. Had they simply hired an in-house Perl guy with even basic familiarity with the language they could have built a vastly superior system faster and on the cheap - and she/he could have been hired for less money than I was making. A Perl guy could also have modified the system on-the-fly as the need arose in near real-time instead of every few years having a two year committee to decide what the next system should be able to do two years later. I've never witnessed more wasteful decisions in my life, and almost entirely because my suggestion to use a little Perl programming held no weight in the minds of the blissfully ignorant. Perl is nearly invisible in the non-IT professional world. All of which gets back to my dummy theory of why certificates work.
People who currently pursue Perl in the absence of a certification program, are a much more motivated group than what will results when the masses seek out a coveted certificate... but are not any more likely to be hired and asked to use their Perl skills to build the next system at XYZ Company because of their superior motivation and expertise. They will more than likely be hired because the manager knows they have C++ or Java skills - and they will use their Perl skills surreptitiously or after the fact (hiring). As I said, the genius in the use of Perl will not improve via certificates, even though the skills will be formally taught to a much larger body of people. Certification will however allow Perl's possible use to greatly broaden, and allow the next crop of Perl converts more latitude and leverage to apply their Pearly skills. This will not directly benefit, and will probably not motivate the current Perl gurus unless they get involved with the certification process, become managers of large Perl programs needing to hire Perl programmers, or obtain certification themselves - which is a bit demeaning since it will not distinguish the quality of the current batch from that of the putative future batch.
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