Adam Turoff said: > 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.
The point of "worst case" is to boil it down to one condition. It isn't oversimplification or bifurcation of an issue, its worst case result of something. The oodles of ways that have been mentioned here all revolve around an idiot with a certificate, and that isn't any worse than the current situation. If there are other, more significant problems with certification, then mention them, and it should be the end of teh conversation. But just talking about ghosts without any evidence doesn't really forward anything. >> 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?" Maybe that was the problem you are trying to solve. The problem I was trying to solve was how do you get wider acceptance of perl? You are committing an oversimplification here with the assumption that the best language will be picked for the job, when the reality is that the choice of language isn't always in the hands of the low level programmers. A project is being started. Perl would solve the problem nicely. The manager/boss/CEO doesn't want perl, and instead wants language X. The problem I'm trying to solve is this: How do you get teh manager to approve that the project be designed around perl? You over-simplify that "getting the job done" will naturally lead to the use of perl in this situation. If you just provide the technical reasons for perl, they'll just think like a programmer and pick perl. They won't. What programmers fail to grasp is that there are peopel with decision-making power who don't make their decisions fully informed of all the technical aspects of the problem. Not every manager selects teh language that will "get the job done", some wil pick a language that they are familiar with. Some will pick a language because they believe the hype that it will solve all their problems. we spent a ton of money recently purchasing licenses for a hardware verification language, but none of teh project schedules have time to switch over, none of the future projects will have time to pre-pend training on this language, and pre-pend the time it will take to convert. every project will use teh previous testbench as is. So those licenses were a waste. But no one asked the engineers in the trenches. This was a decision made by someone at headquarters on the other side of teh country. Your solution works if you've got a programmer making the decisions. I'm talking about a situation where a non-programmer is making the decisions. And in those situations, certification is something that a non-programmer might use to base their decision. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
