Re: Lua certification announcement

[Adriano Ferreira <a.r.ferreira@...>]

Gosh,

> This certification seeks to provide the Lua community
> with an up-to-date, platform-neutral, vendor-neutral certification ad
> ministered in a secure proctored environment.

Lua is up-to-date, platform-neutral, vendor-neutral and
certification-neutral. Lua is open-source, flexible and supported by a
community of high-skilled developers. The ones that wish to enter this
community will not learn everything there is in a flash. But an exam
would not help much either. By the way, it may even hurt your pocket.

Some questions:
* who certifies the certification company?
* I think guys like Roberto and LHF are not certified. What this means?
* programmers can prove their proficiency by writing code. Ain't it?

Sorry for my extreme position. To start make money out of this is a
general loss, I think. A loss to Lua community and to newbies. The
community powered as it is by volunteer contributions should not bow
or endorse (implicitly or explicitly) a certification program by a
for-profit company. Newbies should not be misled to think there is a
certification in Lua that grants you entrance to the Halls of Fame of
the programming language. (Er, that was histrionic.)

In the circle of the other languages (Perl and Python) you offer
certification, it is very common the refusal of attempts to
standardize and certificate. The main point, I guess, is that no one
is found liable for this task (even by the supporting foundations and
main developers).

In this sense, training is one thing. But certification is to give an
assurance on proficiency no one has been entitled to give. Programming
is hard and it would take serious efforts for one to become proficient
and productive. There is no shortcut for this, only advertising
campaigns.

Let's keep Lua as it is: open. Let's not make it like Java (Sun's pet)
or C++ (commitee's freak).

Regards,
Adriano.