On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 14:46:19 -0500 (EST), Greg London <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Chris Devers said: > > I think it would be nice if Perl were more popular. I don't think > > advocacy is a bad thing. I don't think certification, or courses, are > > unreasonable. But of the ways I can think of to make Perl more popular, > > I'm not sure that any of these will be more effective than simply > > writing great software that a lot of people benefit from: setting up a > > certification program; setting up a marketing campaign; ranting about > > the matter endlessly on mailing lists; shouting down people who think > > that having more great software would be a good thing. > > It seems that the poeple who want to talk about certification are > the ones getting shouted down here.
I think that you're seriously misrepresenting what is happening here. > --- > Hey, maybe we could create certifcation as a way to advocate perl. > Shut up. certification doesn't prove anything. I think responses are more along the lines of, "certification introduces a lot of problems, and we don't see how you'll make a certification become accepted." > But it might make advocate perl in the business world. > Shut up. the business world is an idiot if it doesn't use perl when it should. I think responses are more along the lines of, "we don't think that the business world pays as much attention as you think. If you think that it does, then please explain the success, past and present, of C, C++, PHP and Perl." > But if they pay attention to certification, why not give it to them? > Shut up. Certification only makes money for the certification company. Again, we're dubious that companies pay as much attention as you think that they do, and it comes with costs. > But what if OReilly could offer free web-based certification? > Shut up and do it yourself. I think that several have mentioned the cheap (used to be free) web-based certification at http://www.brainbench.com/. You have not explained why we should expect another one to have significantly better uptake than that one. > I can't do it myself, that's why I'm bringing it to the Perl Monger list. > Shut up and advocate then, and stop arguing on the mailing list. Strange how that works. You don't feel that you can tackle the task and so argue on a mailing list, most of the members of whom are in no better position to do it than you are. What do you expect to happen? You then find out that this is a common source of discussion, and a lot of people who are in better positions to do something about it than you are also dubious about it. But you don't seem to be trying to understand why, you're just frustrated that we are not acting on it. Again, would you predict this to be useful? If you really wanted you could say, "I'm going to tackle this, I need help, anyone who wants to help me please sign up here." That would be more likely to go somewhere. Better yet, I pointed you at a past discussion which showed you that there are prominent people who agree with you. You could go to one of them (Tim Maher comes to mind) and say, "I understand that you're interested in getting Perl certification off of the ground, is there any way that I can help?" He has several advantages over you. He runs a training business, he is well-known within the community, he has a better idea than you do of who is likely to help and who isn't. That option sounds depressingly effective, you might actually get somewhere. But no. Instead you're spending time talking about how important this is without actually doing anything about it. And then you're wondering why it is going nowhere. For an excellent overview of why this usually won't work I highly recommend reading _The Logic of Collective Action_. > --- > > The mailing list is a shared channel. I don't shout people > down because they're talking about something I don't want > them to talk about. If you don't like certification, fine. > If you have some historical information to give about it, fine. > If you have some knowledge about certifciations attempt, fine. I think that I gave you all of the things that you say are fine. In fact I've given you all of them in this post. > But after a certain point, the conversation moved from pointing > out all the problems with certification, to attempting to push > the conversation off the mailing list completely. There was at > least one request to Ron to kill this thread, maybe two, I can't > remember. And now most of the resistance is coming from people > who have the attitude of "Just fucking do it, stop talking about it." Ron's request was to stop personal attacks in this thread. Which is fair, and may likely have been directed at something that I said. As for continued resistance, at some point if a discussion is going nowhere, it makes sense to drop it. > Some poeple seem to have broken out in hives at the mere mention > of certification and are foaming at the mouth to the point where > they cannot remain silent while a couple people talk about > certification, even if it doesn't go anywhere. Am I one of the people who you think has "broken out in hives at the mere mention of certification"? > The only "shouting down" I've done is to demand use of the > channel for a legitimate conversation: perl advocacy. Some of the ranting that I saw from you didn't exactly look that way to me... Cheers, Ben _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
