On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 07:41 PM, Ben Tilly wrote:
What don't you believe? That there are rabidly anti-certification people? That many prominent Perl programmers are among them? If you doubt that, then I'll call you reality-challenged to your face and point you in the general direction of Randal Schwartz. For a sample of what they think and why they think that, read http://use.perl.org/articles/04/01/10/0055227.shtml?tid=9.
Hmm. That page also links to the OSCON 2003 Panel Discussion on Perl Certification which voted 100 to 7 in favor of certification. That's not exactly a "bifurcation" of the community, nor is the appellation "many" appropriate. A tyranny of the minority perhaps. Mr. Shwartz is either one of the 7 or a compatriot of like mind. He states an opinion that "Certification is an artificial incline, usually created by those who stand the most to profit from it. After the initial sunk cost of getting employers to believe in this artificial slope, such a corporation then gets to sit back and rake in dough based on the now artificially created demand for certifications and certification support (trainings, books, infrastructure, and so on)."
I use the Shwartzian transformation all the time... never quite understood it, but use it like mad, so Randal's Perl credentials are not in question. However Mr. Shwartz's model of the problem does not reflect majority opinion with respect to the breadth of the issue, (especially as it seems to be peppered with idealism and anti-capitalism). His arguments strike me more as the ideology of the status quo, and not as a practical approach to Perl's future. (The Perl that was and that might have been). Furthermore, he is certainly not "rabid". Miffed perhaps, but not the extremely emotive. Supporters of certification on the OSCON Vote on Perl Certification include Damian Conway, Nathan Torkington, and Tim Wilde.
Speaking personally, what I most dislike about the idea of certifications is the likelyhood that I'd be pushed to waste time and money demonstrating that I know Perl. My time and my money. (Why should an employer who knows that they hired an expert wish to invest their money into enabling me to prove my competence to others?)
This is like "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". It sounds like you don't want to loose a job opportunity to some newbie certificate wielding neophyte because you didn't want to pay for the certificate and don't want to be hassled with some stupid test when you already know your stuff. Hence, you think that your best interest is served by opposing Certification. But that doesn't change the fact that Certification will open doors for Perl to be used much more widely, and will create much more commercial opportunity. Its like a mercantilist standing in the way of free trade.
What is in this picture for me?
Now you touch on my early point.
A certification that has very prominent and vocal opponents within the community is likely to have an uphill battle to acceptance. A certification that didn't have enough support for people to learn what they need to pass it is going to find that the hill is looking more like a cliff.
Eh, let us return to my earlier point... a prominent and vocal MINORITY.
Universities are not supposed to be in the business of vocational training. Some academics take that very seriously.
MIT's charter requires the school to impart practical real-world knowledge. Carnegie-Mellon was founded to give its students "skills useful to industry". Nobody challenges their academic credentials - especially not computer scientists. I don't see that learning Perl is either vo-tech, or other-worldly.
I consider it more likely that the certification process will open divides within the community that leave less energy for people to support Perl.
The mechanism of this divide is? Tectonic plates comprised of hardened opinions sliding away from each other?
And here we see another major pitfall.
Perl is used for a lot of different things. Perl tends to be good glue. Which means that you need to understand the things that you're trying to glue together.
It will be difficult to impossible to provide a single curriculum that addresses all of the different needs to be useful everywhere from mod_perl to database processing to bioinformatics to system administration.
Which of the following topics should be in a certification? In what depth?
- OO support - Templating tools (Mason, Template::Toolkit, etc) - database interfaces - XML manipulation tools - Graphics libraries - How to write XS interfaces - interprocess communication - The Win32 API - Complex regular expressions
Every one of these matters a lot to a segment of the community. None of them matter to everyone. I'd suspect that few people actually need to understand 2/3 of these topics. Most probably only need to know half of them. But different people need to know different halves.
No simple certification is going to address this problem.
I agree. Perl needs, and frankly deserves, a much more complex certification process than a single one size fits all sheepskin. Industry would welcome a more qualified system which addresses specific skills as well.
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