Re: [Boston.pm] CERTIFIABLE: a play in one act
On Friday, March 4, 2005, at 04:41 PM, Tom Metro wrote: Bogart Salzberg wrote: I put some of our recent posts on the certification issue into a blender and this is what came out. Wow, I can't say I've ever seen a flame war summarized as a play before. Impressive. I can't wait for the movie. -Tom Perhaps we have just seen the next step in the evolution of Perl culture. On stage dramatizations of Classic Perl polemics. Any body want to create an oil painting of the debate? ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] (also) Perl
On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 10:54 PM, Ben Tilly wrote: In an interview what you just said would make me worried. You're using a technique that you don't understand. Interesting that you've imagined yourself in a position to be interviewing me. Not a very likely scenario though. However Mr. Shwartz's model of the problem does not reflect majority opinion with respect to the breadth of the issue, When you misspelled Schwartzian transform, I thought it was possibly a typo. But you've made the same mistake again. His name is Schwartz. With a silent c in it. Agree or disagree with him, it is polite to get his name correct. It must really suck not to have anything relevant to certification to say, and yet wanting to say so much so badly. Back handed personal attacks seldom further your point of view. Future advice, people who start and run their own businesses are seldom anti-capitalistic. If you think that they are being so, then you're probably missing something important about how they perceive their own economic interests. A lecture about what people who start and run their own business are like? PLEASE TELL ME MORE! Randal speaks a little on his interest in money on the page you suggested, and I don't think this would be characterized as naked capitalist greed: I've worked too hard over the past decade to help this community in as many free ways as I can, and get paid for the things that I have to get paid for so that I can put food on the table and pay for my net access. In a straw poll of the 3 programmers sitting closest to me, one was slightly against, one slightly for, and one didn't care. I think that that's probably representative. Well, gee, I had no idea that the guy next to you agrees... MIT is also the school which introduced Scheme as a way of introducing programming. Point being? I doubt that Carnegie-Mellon teaches a course whose purpose is to specifically help you pass the MCSE. Point being? (If it does, I guarantee that I can find people in the department who're not very happy about it.) I think you misunderstand why the great technical schools are so great. Rule 1: They seldom get caught up in the mental masturbation of the impractical. Having sold MIT to industry for 7 years in a past life I can safely say that its close ties to the practical concerns of industry are its greatest strength, and why an MIT education prepares students to be relevant to the real world. Hire somebody from a school more caught up in ivory tower snobbery, and you have to wait at least a year before they come up to speed. Furthermore even in professional schools (medicine, law, etc), while the school may provide practical training, the faculty are still expected to participate in (and are likely to be primarily judged on) research. That's certainly true of both schools that you mention. You use every misdirection debating technique in existence. Engineering research is hardly academia. At least at MIT and to a lesser extent CMU, it is almost always looking toward a practical application. Net result: 4,000 MIT related companies. 12 Nobel prize winners on staff. The deepest industrial ties of any school in the world. I stand by my comment that, charter's notwithstanding, universities are not supposed to be in the business of vocational training. (Although they are often pushed in that direction, particularly by students and parents of students who go there to help job prospects.) Sigh. Yes. They are not votech schools teaching welding and oil filter replacement. This might work out, or might not. I'm inclined towards pessimism, but have no real evidence supporting that. It would make life easier for companies that need to hire Perl programmers for basic routine programming jobs. Its not a guru netting tool, but gurus are not what many companies need. I would love to have somebody to take over many of the mundane Perl tasks I have at my company one day. I don't need to hire a Randal or a Larry nearly as much as I need somebody basically trained. Somebody I can trust to do basic level tasks so I can focus on growth and marketing. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] (also) Perl
On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 09:28 AM, John Saylor wrote: hi ( 05.02.25 16:56 -0500 ) James Linden Rose, III: Certification for Perl will certainly NOT raise the intellectual bar of its practitioners, but it will certainly make many more people into converts on both the programmer and the manager side of the equation. converts to what- perl or certification? If certification existed, more people would study Perl because they would be able to obtain a piece of paper that proves they understand it to some industry standard, and they could then use their certified credentials to suggest Perl for real world problem solving. Presenting 3rd party evidence that they can indeed pull off their proposal is what Perl needs. It would also allow managers who are not programmers to feel more confident that Perl was a serious language that could accomplish industrial strength tasks, and that the person presenting himself to be hired has a requisite level of skill with Perl to be trusted with the task. Without certification there is no way for the non-programmer to judge if anyone presenting themselves as a Perl programmer knows anything, and Perl looks very amateurish to the uninitiated non-programmer when compared to languages with formal certification and corporate support. In addition to the story I told about my own company is a story from my old job at MIT. Our boss hired an Israeli woman tasked with deciding on the next version of our in-house data management system... I had to sit on many of the endless meetings to discuss the system we needed, and when I approached her about how wasteful I thought her spending plans were as I knew that what we needed was quite simple and I could do it myself, she refused to even discuss building any of the tools the office needed in-house because Perl wasn't a real language in her mind, and my boss considered her to be an expert since she knew that Java programmers were certified professionals. They then blew $500,000 on a system I could have built for free in my spare time in a fraction of the time (they still haven't finished their system and about 7 years have gone by now since the start of discussion), a system that they cannot maintain without further expenditures of both time and money in perpetuity and at a very great level of expense. Had they simply hired an in-house Perl guy with even basic familiarity with the language they could have built a vastly superior system faster and on the cheap - and she/he could have been hired for less money than I was making. A Perl guy could also have modified the system on-the-fly as the need arose in near real-time instead of every few years having a two year committee to decide what the next system should be able to do two years later. I've never witnessed more wasteful decisions in my life, and almost entirely because my suggestion to use a little Perl programming held no weight in the minds of the blissfully ignorant. Perl is nearly invisible in the non-IT professional world. All of which gets back to my dummy theory of why certificates work. People who currently pursue Perl in the absence of a certification program, are a much more motivated group than what will results when the masses seek out a coveted certificate... but are not any more likely to be hired and asked to use their Perl skills to build the next system at XYZ Company because of their superior motivation and expertise. They will more than likely be hired because the manager knows they have C++ or Java skills - and they will use their Perl skills surreptitiously or after the fact (hiring). As I said, the genius in the use of Perl will not improve via certificates, even though the skills will be formally taught to a much larger body of people. Certification will however allow Perl's possible use to greatly broaden, and allow the next crop of Perl converts more latitude and leverage to apply their Pearly skills. This will not directly benefit, and will probably not motivate the current Perl gurus unless they get involved with the certification process, become managers of large Perl programs needing to hire Perl programmers, or obtain certification themselves - which is a bit demeaning since it will not distinguish the quality of the current batch from that of the putative future batch. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] (also) Perl
From: James Linden Rose, III [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon Feb 28, 2005 5:42:06 PM US/Eastern To: Adam Turoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] (also) Perl On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 12:46 PM, Adam Turoff wrote: Another worst case for certification is that the community bifurcates from those who are rabidly anti-certification, and they take their efforts and talents elsewhere. And their patches. And stop maintaining their modules. I don't believe in this perspective. Why would anyone be rabidly anti-certification? That seems terribly irrational. I would call such a person a certifiphobe to his face. How does one person's certification offend some other person who doesn't believe in it? Take their talents where? Where are they fleeing to? Fleeing from what? The train of logic seems to have episodes of being aeronautical. I understand that some may think certification is a waist of time, but how does that offend or discourage that person from upgrading their module? Another worst case for certification is the gradual dumbing down of the caliber of Perl programmers that Joe Average Manager can hire. I could go on. The point is that Joe Average Manager ISN'T hiring Perl programmers. Only his elitist cousin, the savvy manager is. How does increasing the number of Perl practitioners reduce the potential talent the manager can hire? The same old self-taught, self proclaimed Perl mongers remain in the job pool as before. The wise and technology savvy manager still uses him. The idiot manager who was hiring Java beans now hires the mediocre Perl plebeian. - Certification doesn't _prove_ anything. It's mostly a means to weed out resumes when you have 1000 applicants for one job. When you go to hire Perl programmers it will mean something. As things are, there are lot of people who claim to be able to use Perl who would have trouble with any level task. Besides, there's a simple substitute for certification that is more impressive... which is show me something you've built with Perl. - The point behind certification efforts is generally to grow the pool of Perl programmers. The logic is that a rising tide lifts all ships: more jobs for entry level programmers, more jobs for gurus, and so on. However: - there is no demonstrable evidence that there is a mass of programmers ready to use Perl, if only there were a certification they could get This is a strawman argument. There is no mass of programmers ready to use Perl because there is no educational forum available to learn and prove that you have learned the language. Would you, without the reward of a college degree, take it upon yourself to study Calculus, Simplex Algorithm, Linear Programming, Statistics - hoping one day somebody would come to the idea of granting you a BS in mathematics, or would you study these fields knowing that you would receive a degree for your efforts that you could then parley into a job? Without the promise your certificate holds most would not embark on the course of formal study. - there is no demonstrable evidence that there is a pool of employers that do not use Perl simply because there are no certified applicants I have personal experience that leads me to believe the contrary. Besides, the non-savvy manager is going to ask his certified employee for an opinion on what a project should be coded in - and at this time, that employee is not a Perl monger. Perl is at best viewed as a hobby without the magic credentials, in the same way you would be viewed as a smart guy who is nevertheless still too risky to hire if you sat in the library reading for 4 years outside the context of a degree granting institution. This, right or wrong, is just the reality of how our world works, and ignoring this only hurts Perl. - there is no demonstrable evidence that simply offering certification will answer the questions hiring managers will ask But at least the Perl guy will get his chance to field the question. - Many Perl trainers are vehemently anti-certification. A certification without a supporting training curriculum is dead in the water. I agree. A Perl certificate should come along with a corresponding but optional educational package. Perhaps the certificate can even come with a version number so that later numbers are more valuable than older ones... keep the certification and education constantly improving. - Sure, they could turn around, and sure, other trainers are just as vehemently pro-certification. But this difference of opinion should be resolved before any certification effort moves forward, and it's been a complete logjam for years. Don't follow how the logjam is created or important. Why
Re: [Boston.pm] (also) Perl
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
Re: [Boston.pm] (also) Perl
On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 08:03 PM, John Redford wrote: I am anti-certification. Why? To put it extremely bluntly: certifications are socialist. People who believe in certifications have the same naïf mentality as people who believe in socialism. This sounds like an opinion that's going to be dead center, focused on target right from the outset. In theory, certifications would be granted to people upon their demonstration that they understood the material covered by the certification. And, in theory, a high school diploma indicates that a person is able to read and write. You're of course correct... and we should all band together to eliminate high school diplomas. In reality, certifications would be given to people who paid for them, regardless of what they know. I got my diploma because my teachers were all socialists. I tried to bribe them, but they said Mao's Little Red Book forbade it. So I promised not to make higher grades than any of my other classmates, and I was the darling of the class from thereon out. The hiring practices of companies would require that the certification be held, thus requiring that the job candidates pay whatever fee the certifying authority wishes to charge. For a small bribe, the person administering the test would provide the candidate with the answers. With the certification being the key to better employment, the bribe would be a small price for the candidate to pay. I wonder if that's how my sister's surgeon got his medical license? Deciding not to hire a person who holds certifications becomes hard to justify. Class Action Suit: Did you have a programming certification, interview for a job, and were not hired? We may be able to get money for YOU. Call Edgar Snyder at 1.800... Firing a person for incompetence would become even more problematic, as their holding of a certification would be considered proof of their competence. This is of course, predicated on the fact that the employee is incompetent because he bribed his instructor. The job market moves, to a small or large degree, towards a static pool of incompetent criminals who cannot be fired and cannot contribute. Precisely what Java is, and why we have to save the world from the scourge of socialism. What problem are you trying to solve? By what theory? With what experience? I'm trying to prevent reactionary agents of Java from infiltrating the Perl Mongers. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] (also) Perl
On Friday, February 25, 2005, at 03:04 PM, Alex Brelsfoard wrote: I think part of the problem is that it is an open source system that doesn't have a fund for advertising. I think if we simply saw some commercials on tv talking about Perl, or telling about all it's success stories. Heck even if they're just like the Intel commercials simply saying Yeah, here we are. We're Perl. We're cool. Yeah, so like us. It wouldn't take many to make a difference. Perl isn't completely without commercial allies. Being the dominant publisher of Perl related texts, it has certainly been in O'Reily's interest to promote its use. That aside, over the last 10 years, the number of shared CGI scripts written in perl and available to the web developing community is vast. I'm sure it dwarfs all other languages. What Perl is really lacking is a widely recognized, widely accessible certification program. When you hire Java programmers they walk in the door with papers proving that somebody said they know what they're doing. Perl is generally practiced outside this whole vetting process. That makes less technically experienced bosses woozy with fear. You know you're a genius with Perl, but no 3rd party has printed up a certificate telling your employer this. ___ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
Re: [Boston.pm] more on hosting and email suggestions, any experience with VPS?
While we're on the topic, this lurker would like to know if there is anything better for running multiple websites than a BHCOM.com virtual server (I pay $59 per month for the virtual server, and $25 per month to be able to host up to 25 domain names (total $84). All of my websites have the same IP address... and I usually have from 6 to 12 up and running at any one time. I've been their customer for many years now... service is great... just wondering if I can do better. They also own 4domains.com, so I can integrated domain name management with the server Jim ___ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
