On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Jonathan Peterson wrote: > I can't see ORA, Activestate etc having enough weight to push this. An > IBM or a Microsoft or a Sun would do, but it seems to me the Perl > community has few links with these organisations (maybe I'm wrong?).
Weight? I dunno, but even so I think ORA or Activestate makes more sense, just because Perl [& Python, tcl/tk, etc] is more in their interest. Would Sun be willing to sponsor Perl certifications if such a program was seen as a competition to Java certification? My guess is that they would, and that maybe individual Sun employees might be all for it, but as a company they wouldn't put their name behind it. IBM or, ironically, Microsoft might be a little more likely, if only because they aren't really trying to push languages of their own (not counting VB/VC++, as the fact that they have two major offerings indicates at least some degree of language agnosticism on Microsoft's part). But in the end, I just don't think any of those three would *care*, in the way that O'Reilly or ActiveState would. Why devote resources to a big, expensive certification program when it doesn't really matter to them what language people are using to develop software on their systems? For that matter, why devote those resources into a language that you can get for free anyhow, and that can't [easily] be monetized? (In that light, that would be a strike against Perl certification from MS's point of view.) At least O'Reilly could make money of books like _PCRE in a Nutshell_. I can't see e.g. Sun pitting Perl against Java... -- Chris Devers "People with machines that think, will in times of crisis, make up stuff and attribute it to me" - "Nikla-nostra-debo"
