On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 23:52 -0500, Greg London wrote: > Did you ever get a cool idea for a problem > and just dive into it, explore it, learn > about it, try out different things, and play?
Yes. When I do that, I don't post to a public list saying, "what if I just take this line of code, and move it over here... and then... well, perhaps I'll... I dunno ... it could... maybe it would run faster." If DID, however, I would certainly respect those who said, "Joe over here tried exactly that on that section of code, and here are his benchmarks." Your level of respect for those comments was summed up best in one word, "HOOONNNKK!" > But that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking > about the way JFK was a damned fool for saying he > wanted to put a man on the moon before the decade > was out. completely impossible at the time he > said it. His speechwriters didn't want him > to go public wiht it because they figured there was > a good chance it wouldn't happen, and then he'd look bad > for saying something so foolish and not having it > come true. Ah, but you're not talking about solving a problem, no matter how hard. If you were, then you would have left certification out of it (at least at first) and asked if people wanted to beat around the idea of how to improve Perl popularity. You wanted to talk about a PARTICULAR MEANS. JFK didn't deliver a spec for the rocket and say THIS will make it to the moon, now let's talk about that. He stated a goal. These are VERY different things. If you want to talk about making Perl more popular, here are some ideas ranked in order of how likely I think they are to succeed in terms of large scale adoption. * Help make CPANPLUS work well with all extant package managers * Work on Perl 6 / Parrot / Pugs * Write documentation * Review / suggest edits to existing documentation * Lobby more large companies to formally support local user groups > So, my message has always been along the line of > can I just play around with this idea foolishly, > without all the reasons why it will never work? Not on a public list, no. You are free to ask the question, but not to expect others to constrain themselves to your arbitrary lines of response. It's not that people don't like you personally, it's just that we all feel kind of put upon to be told, "don't say what you think, just let me noodle around on this list." It's exclusionary. You have as much a right to talk about certification's potential as someone else does to say it's a lose. > "What if you had a way to do certification that > was no cost to the programmer, but considered > valuable by the corporate world?" > "What if?" not "How?" The next, obvious, burning question is: how? I'm sorry, but we're programmers. It's painful to see such a statement and not respond with a request for well defined parameters. And yet, I'll answer: such ways have existed for years, and they seem to have little effect, so no, not really. There, that's an answer to a "what if / would it be", not a "how". The question also begs the question (in the rhetorical sense) of why it would be considered of value to the programmer, and that too was discussed. > So, no, neither you nor anyone on this list > ever listened along the lines of my message, Yeah, we did. > I failed this time, that is clear. But I learned > something about how I relate to people who relate > to teh world as a list of what is impossible. You're mis-characterizing the people on this list. No one is thinking in those terms, as far as I've seen. We're just being very mildly pragmatic. > I don't like being given a list of what is > impossible when I'm trying to play. Then form the "play with Perl advocacy" list, don't ask an existing list to re-form around your idea of what a valid discussion of certification and its value is. > I didn't know > that until this discussion. And I learned it > because I got pulled into it and only at the end > figured out what was going on. Hopefully, if > nothing else good comes of all this, it will teach > me not to get sucked into the "what is impossible" > debate when I'm trying to come from what is possible, > trying to come from play. I think if you had avoided interpreting responses as a "what is impossible debate", then that would have worked out well too. > No one ever heard the "What if?" > they only heard "Why not?" No, they (we) heard the "what if". You didn't hear the "in that case, you get the following observed results." _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
