Richard Chycoski wrote: > Neil Neely wrote: >> I've been using puppet for 8 months and have yet to learn Ruby[1]. > > OTOH, after you've learned a few computer languages, picking up one or > two more is truly trivial, and you'll probably be writing those Ruby > scripts in your sleep in no time! Absolutely - I certainly didn't intend to imply that picking it up was a bad thing. Merely that so far it hasn't been *required*. Workload + economy = doing a whole lot more, with a whole lot less, and the fun stuff like picking up a language I don't need to has been bumped back to a future time. > My point - if learning yet-another-programming-language is daunting to > you, perhaps you should look for an easier field to work in. If by learn you mean able to understand and have sufficient background to troubleshoot and make minor change to, or perform minor tasks with than I would agree that is a requirement of the field. I'm not so sure that I would agree that the ability to develop serious applications in N languages is a requirement of the profession.
I find it funny to be the one making that statement, as I am a software developer at heart, and learning new languages is something I personally enjoy doing, I also have a hard time remembering all the languages I've picked up over the years, though I haven't developed serious applications in that many. The reason I make the distinction is that I've had the pleasure of working with some great SA's over the years who's software development skills were middling at best, and it really wasn't their strong point. They were however good at administering systems. When you put tools like puppet in the hands of people like this you are giving them a tool that lets them play to their strengths. Whether or not they can ever be at the top of their field however... I don't know. I'm not very objective on the topic as my background is as a software developer and I tend to think you need that kind of a background to be truly great at system administration. But I'm open to the fact that perhaps this is just my own bias. -- Neil Neely http://neil-neely.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
