On Wednesday 19 April 2006 16:32, L505 wrote: > I didn't say pure pascal programmers with no other skills.
Of course you didn't say *that*. But it still sounds like you are very focused on language skills. Language skills are much less important than people usually think. > most > pascal programmers know databases, Assembly, and C. They also usually > know at least one scripting language such as PHP. It is *not* about knowing a language (or two, or more). Knowing about stones won't give you the ability to build a house. Unfortunately most people in the software business seem to think it does. It doesn't. It's that simple. Software development is not about *where* to put this or that statement, it is much more about the *why*: In the end it's math, logic and abstraction (among some others). A particular language is just one way to express those. Of course, having some knowledge helps to get a project started, but this is too short-term thinking. I even learned by observation that having knowledge (especially about C-like languages) actually seems to hurt. And hell, I practically learned Java in a couple of days. Anything else from that point on consists in looking up the documentation on which class I may need. Well, I don't consider being able to successfully scan a telephon book for a particalur name a special skill. I just expect people to be bright enough to do *that*. Are my expectations set way too high here? > I plan to hire/pay Pascal programmers at some point for future > commercial projects. Who will I hire? Probably the folks that have > worked with me on open source projects before. Yes, that might be a good start. But you miss the main point: that these people showed motivation and you may even be able to judge their general "software-engineering" abilities (how they designed their projects, modularized it, how they managed it, etc.pp). Any specific language skills are just /not/ important, believe. Of course, the willingness to do it in a different language might be. Regards, Vinzent. -- Yet a warning is nothing more than the compiler, which knows far more about the language than most of us, saying "hey, you're scaring me, man." -- Jack Ganssle, Embedded Muse 129 _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal