Is It Time for Perl Certification?

By Tim Maher

November 17, 2003

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During my six years as a Perl educator and contract programmer, I've often pondered the problems facing the Perl community. One of these is the alarming state of un- or under-employment of many Perl specialists (including some of our brightest stars), while our colleagues who program in more prosaic languages such as Java and C++ enjoy more secure job positions.

To gain a better understanding of how Perl and its programmers are perceived in the industry, I've talked with managers of Information Technology (IT) departments and professionals working in Human Resources (HR) and recruiting agencies. This has led me to some conclusions about how we could improve our situation that I'm eager to share with you.

But first, you should know some of the pertinent aspects of my background. During my 12 years in academia, I obtained a wealth of experience in both taking and constructing examinations, and I studied techniques for computer assisted learning and testing. Later, while working with Sun Microsystems Inc., I had to take and pass the certification exams of the "Solaris System Administrator" series, and I provided feedback to help improve their quality.

These experiences have made me comfortable with testing technologies, but also highly cognizant of the need for testing to be done accurately and responsibly.

Before I turn to the subject of Perl certification, I'll review certain aspects of Perl's current status in the enterprise.

Perl's Image Is Cool, but Strange

It goes without saying that Perl is a marvelously expressive, extensible, and productive language that's fun to use. This has been noticed by many IT departments that value it as a general-purpose scripting language, a language for CGI or DB development, or one for cross-platform system administration.

Unfortunately, from the vantage point of old-school computer science types, Perl can also look like a "toy language" when compared to ones such as C++ and Java. That's partly due to Perl's lack of support for many features that let IT managers sleep better at night, such as strict type checking, compile-time function binding, standardized exception handling, and a conventional OO model.<>

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