Conference moment: Lisp certification?
Kenny Tilton
conference to check out Lisp for a new $5m project. It's a C++ shop and
they are not in love with the overnight builds. One guy in his group has
been "playing with Lisp" and encouraged its use in the new project, so
this guy came to check us out. (Or get a week in Frisco on the company's
dime. <g>) Anyway, he was worried a lot about justifying Lisp to other
management, even if he concluded Lisp would be better.
One specific: he said the ALU should cook up a certification exam. He
understood that certification might be a joke in our domain, but that
nevertheless it was the kind of thing that would make Lisp look more
respectable to MegaCorp types.
He even seemed to think a simple timed on-line test would do the trick,
though how you stop cheating I do not know.
This was a new one on me, and was only one bloke's input. I scoff at
certification for programmers, but if it would be easy to implement and
if folks in tall buildings care (two big ifs) why not?
--
kenny tilton
clinisys, inc
---------------------------------------------------------------
""Well, I've wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, Doctor,
and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.""
Elwood P. Dowd
Marc Spitzer
@nyc.rr.com:
> There was a fellow from MegaCorp (manager, not a programmer) who did the
> conference to check out Lisp for a new $5m project. It's a C++ shop and
> they are not in love with the overnight builds. One guy in his group has
> been "playing with Lisp" and encouraged its use in the new project, so
> this guy came to check us out. (Or get a week in Frisco on the company's
> dime. <g>) Anyway, he was worried a lot about justifying Lisp to other
> management, even if he concluded Lisp would be better.
>
> One specific: he said the ALU should cook up a certification exam. He
> understood that certification might be a joke in our domain, but that
> nevertheless it was the kind of thing that would make Lisp look more
> respectable to MegaCorp types.
>
> He even seemed to think a simple timed on-line test would do the trick,
> though how you stop cheating I do not know.
>
> This was a new one on me, and was only one bloke's input. I scoff at
> certification for programmers, but if it would be easy to implement and
> if folks in tall buildings care (two big ifs) why not?
>
If it was done for real look at how www.giac.org does it. You need to
write a paper and pass before you get to sit for the test. Then your paper
is posted on the web so that people can review your work. It is a good
deal of work to get this done though. The brainbench type web tests are
things I would not put on my resumee.
marc
Erik Naggum
| One specific: he said the ALU should cook up a certification exam.
How about just asking people to give a paper at a Lisp conference and
making sure that the quality standards are sufficiently high?
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~almeroth/conf/stats/
--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
Marc Spitzer
> * Kenny Tilton
>| One specific: he said the ALU should cook up a certification exam.
>
> How about just asking people to give a paper at a Lisp conference and
> making sure that the quality standards are sufficiently high?
>
> http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~almeroth/conf/stats/
>
I do not know, a certifacation is suposed to demonstrate a certian min
level of mastery consistantly. Your way would allow the people who make
the cut to put it down, much as they do today, but what of the people who's
papers were good enough to be used but not used due to other issues?
I am not saying it is not a good metric, I think it is. But that it is too
subject to outside influences for this purpose.
marc
Erik Naggum
| I am not saying it is not a good metric, I think it is. But that it is
| too subject to outside influences for this purpose.
I must admit to some ulterior motives. First, if this was the requirement,
I would get off the hook because I have given a paper at a Lisp conference.
But (more) importantly, it would make a lot of people submit papers to Lisp
conferences and thus would make the conferences more interesting and more
frequent. Fundamentally, I do not see the point with certification if it
is a "selfish" measure, i.e., one where the community benefit of having one
more certified programmer is negative, which it would be if the purpose was
to make it easier for managers to replace one Common Lisp programmer with
another or have more people compete for the same jobs. If managers want
that, they can have it, but giving it to them should benefit the community
more than the particular manager. Otherwise, managers get a strangle-hold
on the market and will work hard to /lower/ the certification requirements
so that they have more people to choose from and can lower their costs.
The entrance fee to the Certified Common Lisp Programmer market should be
that you have done something that clearly benefits the existing certified
programmers, not just something that benefits the /future/ candidates. The
same rationale underlies the requirements to grant professional degrees.
Kenny Tilton
> * Kenny Tilton
> | One specific: he said the ALU should cook up a certification exam.
>
> How about just asking people to give a paper at a Lisp conference and
> making sure that the quality standards are sufficiently high?
If we are doing a sick form of the Turing Test in which Lisp tries to
fool suits into thinking we are Java, then our certfication process must
look like theirs. I know one criterion is that it must be something
Asians can pass by memorizing a book, so the original content required
of a paper might give us away as Not Java.
Is there a metacertification exam template? Do folks write code during
the exam (as in more than just a line or two)? It would be great fun
here on cll to brainstorm an exam if we knew what it should look like.
btw, the gent from the big company (i think it was a phone company) said
the certification thing itself might draw folks towards CL. A new exam
announced on SlashDot and to the IT press in general in and of itself
would make clear that the news of CL's death (in Wired?) was greatly
exagerated.
Marc Spitzer
> * Marc Spitzer
>| I am not saying it is not a good metric, I think it is. But that it
>| is too subject to outside influences for this purpose.
>
> I must admit to some ulterior motives. First, if this was the
> requirement, I would get off the hook because I have given a paper
> at a Lisp conference. But (more) importantly, it would make a lot of
> people submit papers to Lisp conferences and thus would make the
> conferences more interesting and more frequent.
Yes that would be good. And being grandfathered is always nice.
> Fundamentally, I do not see the point with certification if it is a
> "selfish" measure, i.e., one where the community benefit of having
> one more certified programmer is negative, which it would be if the
> purpose was to make it easier for managers to replace one Common
> Lisp programmer with another or have more people compete for the
> same jobs. If managers want that, they can have it, but giving it
> to them should benefit the community more than the particular
> manager. Otherwise, managers get a strangle-hold on the market and
> will work hard to /lower/ the certification requirements so that
> they have more people to choose from and can lower their costs. The
> entrance fee to the Certified Common Lisp Programmer market should
> be that you have done something that clearly benefits the existing
> certified programmers, not just something that benefits the /future/
> candidates. The same rationale underlies the requirements to grant
> professional degrees.
>
Those are good points that I had not considdered, thanks for bringing
them up.
What would you think of a tiered approach, apprentice -> journeyman ->
master setup. Where the journeyman and master grades would have the
requirement to help current advanced members. I believe I am talking
about a guild or guildish thing.
Also there are certian certs out there that having makes you more money,
CCIE comes to mind. It is a very hard test, here is how it works:
1: take a written test
2: iff you pass then you go to cisco and:
a: day 1 build a network
b: if you built it right then day 2 fix it after they break it.
It is designed to fail people.
I guess the trick is not to let the managers have much, if any, say in
the matter.
marc
J L Russell
news:3DC40755...@nyc.rr.com...
>
> This was a new one on me, and was only one bloke's input. I scoff at
> certification for programmers, but if it would be easy to implement and
> if folks in tall buildings care (two big ifs) why not?
>
Well, I (and probably many people smarter and more talented than me)
object to these sorts of tests on principle. They tend to measure whether
programmer X can do cookie-cutter task Y using language Z (and subsidiary
APIs),
not whether programmer X is any good at, say, problem solving or even, say,
programming.
Most corporations that judge competence and make hiring decisions based
on some third-party jokey-joke test are not the kinds of places that smart
and talented
people are going to enjoy working.
Certifications for other languages have reduced programming from a
profession
to a job, and changed most 'programmers' from engineers to mere technicians.
I would guess that many of the best programmers that choose Common Lisp
would
refuse, on priciple, to go down that road. So what would the test
accomplish?
I envision it inviting hordes of loathsome know-nothing jobbers into the
field,
and sullying the reputations of all serious programmers, making it even more
dificult to find a job, for lack of some idiotic certification.
Screw MegaCorp, I say, let them choke on their own vomit.
-James Russell
J L Russell
> loathsome
Speaking of loathsome, I apologize for the atrocious line breaking.
-James Russell
Kenny Tilton
J L Russell wrote:
> "Kenny Tilton" <kti...@nyc.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:3DC40755...@nyc.rr.com...
>
>>This was a new one on me, and was only one bloke's input. I scoff at
>>certification for programmers, but if it would be easy to implement and
>>if folks in tall buildings care (two big ifs) why not?
>>
..snip...
> Screw MegaCorp, I say, let them choke on their own vomit.
The MegaCorp exec was attending a rare Lisper conference and hearing
endless discussion of how CL could expand its adoption. In that context
he suggested certification would grease the skids for adoption by
fortune 500. I agree with you about certficates, and told the guy as
much. he pointed out to me that he was just saying this might be the
price of the f5 acceptance we were after, so it does not matter what we
think of the process.
Marc Spitzer
>
>
> J L Russell wrote:
>> "Kenny Tilton" <kti...@nyc.rr.com> wrote in message
>> news:3DC40755...@nyc.rr.com...
>>
>>>This was a new one on me, and was only one bloke's input. I scoff at
>>>certification for programmers, but if it would be easy to implement
>>>and if folks in tall buildings care (two big ifs) why not?
>>>
> ..snip...
>
>> Screw MegaCorp, I say, let them choke on their own vomit.
>
> The MegaCorp exec was attending a rare Lisper conference and hearing
> endless discussion of how CL could expand its adoption. In that
> context he suggested certification would grease the skids for adoption
> by fortune 500. I agree with you about certficates, and told the guy
> as much. he pointed out to me that he was just saying this might be
> the price of the f5 acceptance we were after, so it does not matter
> what we think of the process.
>
F500 companys employ a lot of programmers, how do they transition them
to lisp? Also the learning curve to be a productive lisp programmer
apears to be about 2 years, from comments I have read here, and the avg
IT job lasts about 2 years in the US. So the IT manager can not justify
training or growing them to his boss. It is like giving the person a
masters degree and then he leave, not good.
And as Erik pointed out the idea of a Java type cert is a generaly bad
idea.
marc
Marc Spitzer
news:Xns92BB1718AAE18ms...@167.206.3.3:
>
> F500 companys employ a lot of programmers, how do they transition them
> to lisp? Also the learning curve to be a productive lisp programmer
> apears to be about 2 years, from comments I have read here, and the avg
> IT job lasts about 2 years in the US. So the IT manager can not justify
> training or growing them to his boss. It is like giving the person a
> masters degree and then he leave, not good.
>
> And as Erik pointed out the idea of a Java type cert is a generaly bad
> idea.
>
> marc
>
Between this post and my others on this topic I am arguing both sides of
the issue. Hopefully a working solution is some where in the middle.
marc
Tim Bradshaw
> How about just asking people to give a paper at a Lisp conference and
> making sure that the quality standards are sufficiently high?
I think the problem with this is that the skills needed to write
conference papers (typically dealing with some topic which can be
described well in a small number of pages read by a human - so little
confusions and vageuenesses are OK) are different than the skills
needed to write significant programs (typically dealing with a topic
which needs a much larger number of pages to describe, and which is
read by a machine, so must have no little confusions and vageuenesses
at all; however this machine readable description must *also* be
comprehensible to human readers!).
--tim
Christopher C. Stacy
back when Lisp (and AI) was popular. Also, I am highly skeptical
that certification is what's keeping Lisp from being used there now.
I haven't talked with any such companies lately, but one data point
does not make the case for me.
Kenny Tilton
Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> Fortune 500 companies were one of the primary users of Lisp,
> back when Lisp (and AI) was popular. Also, I am highly skeptical
> that certification is what's keeping Lisp from being used there now.
Right, I think it was understood to be a small matter we might want to
consider, just another brick in the wall. The key is, if it is a
no-brainer and we are looking for something to improve CL's adoption,
why not? Give 'em what they want.
As it stands, CL gets laughed out of the running in IT, because the
immune system identifies us as "not-ready-for-IT". Maybe if we adorn
ouselves with a few ITish proteins like certification the immune system
will think we are friend, not foe.
And yes, it was just one opinion from one IT exec who had come to the
Lisp conference ostensibly because one of his people was arguing for
Lisp on the next project. Come to think of it, if we won't listen to
him, who should we listen to, to get into F500? It would be nice to get
more suits into this thread, or at least input from folks here who have
worked in tall buildings.
I have, and I can't say I heard anyone talking about certification.
otoh, i did know one IT recruiter who thought some guy was a genius
because he had passed a wadge of MS exams in short order (an Asian!).
J L Russell
>
>
> Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> > Fortune 500 companies were one of the primary users of Lisp,
> > back when Lisp (and AI) was popular. Also, I am highly skeptical
> > that certification is what's keeping Lisp from being used there now.
>
> Right, I think it was understood to be a small matter we might want to
> consider, just another brick in the wall. The key is, if it is a
> no-brainer and we are looking for something to improve CL's adoption,
> why not? Give 'em what they want.
>
And all I'm saying is, do we really want to work for the forces of darkness?
Any company that has the expertise to determine their true needs and assess
programmer competence doesn't need these tests. Use of these tests is
an admission of managerial incompetence. Who wants to work for such a company?
I might do so only out of sheer desperation.
Is it possible that companies use these tests because they just happen to measure
exactly the skills that the company needs? No. I have taken many tests
in my life, and done quite well on most all of them, and I have never seen one that
measures much of anything other than the ability to do well on that particular test.
I know that this is a trite observance, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Programmer certification tests engender a situation akin to that created by "school
accountability" in the US. In an attempt to lift everyone up to a minimum standard of
competence, we tie funding to test results, and end up churning out droves of students that
have been taught nothing but how to pass the tests. It sucks for everyone in the end.
Don't cave in to immorality out of expediency.
-James Russell
Erik Naggum
| I think the problem with this is that the skills needed to write
| significant programs.
The problem with all certifications is that the skills needed to get the
certification are different from the skills needed in the job requiring
the certification. The question we should ask "does this correlate with
what we actually need?" and allow ourselves to be surprised by the many
unexpected things that do correlate. The human brain is deficient in its
lack of capacity to see how many small things work together. We are very
good at singling out things that are important and focus on that one
thing, but lousy at keeping track of masses of smaller interests that
work together to make change. Usenet is an interesting experiment in
this regard. Some people are so unable to process more than one quality
at a time that they have to /invent/ aspects in order to retro-support
their favorite quality. This is not just the massive stupidity and lack
of intelligence it looks like, it is how people are naturally wired to
deal with the world if they do not consciously override it by thinking.
This is somewhat like voting for people to lead a country. The United
States is /really/ paying the price for its plurality system during this
presidential period. For some reason, how many people would like
something the most is regarded as a reason to choose it. I favor a
system where the number of people who like something the /least/ is
subtracted from the number of people who like it the most, or generally,
a system where each candidate is given positive and negative scores in
some small range (where the sum of the absolute value of all scores is
constant or has a fixed upper limit) and those you feel nothing about
gets zero or no vote at all. The scores are simply summed and whoever
gets the highest total score wins. The purpose of the negative votes is
to ensure that someone who may well be favored by the largest minority
but is loathed by a larger group, perhaps even a majority, not get into a
position where the majority would feel they were not heard and which
would destabilize the entire system. This would ensure that a candidate
would want to get backers on issues, not just fans of their person (or to
avenge their father), and would have to calculate the risk of offending
some groups, not just run over them.
Back to certification, the number of points at which you would have to
score well to be a good candidate for a job is attempted destilled into a
certification, which at best may be assumed to mean "above the baseline",
but the result may well be as undesirable as making George W. Bush the
Republican presidential candidate. In general, I want examinations and
tests to score negative for a wrong answer and zero for no answer, and if
it were up to me, "I don't know" would be far more socially acceptable
than "I guess". But no such luck. Even the business community favors
people who make wrong decisions over those who try to figure out what the
best thing is and effectively make a decision not to act. But you get
what you deserve when you operate that way. Unfortunately, people who
should not get a job in programming get one because of certification,
people who should be kept as far away from money as possible run both
Enron and WorldCom and Arthur Andersen into the ground, and people who
should be kept as far as away from Washington D.C. as possible get into
the White House instead of staying in Texas and lots and lots of people
suffer worldwide. Incompetence should be a criminal offence. The core
problem is that certification does not solve any big problems, only small
ones, just as book-keeping and auditing does not keep people from being
criminals.
Christopher Browne
> And all I'm saying is, do we really want to work for the forces of
> darkness?
>
> Any company that has the expertise to determine their true needs and
> assess programmer competence doesn't need these tests. Use of these
> tests is an admission of managerial incompetence. Who wants to work
> for such a company? I might do so only out of sheer desperation.
I'd be game to say this in a somewhat "less hostile" manner.
> Is it possible that companies use these tests because they just
> happen to measure exactly the skills that the company needs? No. I
> have taken many tests in my life, and done quite well on most all of
> them, and I have never seen one that measures much of anything other
> than the ability to do well on that particular test. I know that
> this is a trite observance, but that doesn't make it any less true.
The /useful/ tests I have taken have been administrated by someone
competent that was looking to see if I understood things.
The latest example was actually a couple of weeks ago, relating to
starting a contract. I "punted" on a couple questions, hacking a
timestamp into UTC because I never can remember without consulting
manuals how to do date computations in SQL. What was particularly
interesting was that the fellow reviewing the results commented that
some of the answers were unconventional, but that people usually got
the questions downright /wrong/.
And there probably lies the other piece: A /good/ test is one where
you'll get some answers wrong, because it has some questions tough
enough to challenge everyone. Which may be nicely contrasted with the
"certification" thing where 'it isn't a good certification unless
typical Asian "memorize 'til you drop" techniques can be used.'
> Don't cave in to immorality out of expediency.
.. But remember that by not being thusly expedient, you'll be largely
excluded from F500 environs. That's not necessarily a /bad/ thing,
but it's something to keep in mind.
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string "moc.enworbbc@" "sirhc"))
http://cbbrowne.com/info/unix.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #64. "I will see a competent psychiatrist
and get cured of all extremely unusual phobias and bizarre compulsive
habits which could prove to be a disadvantage."
<http://www.eviloverlord.com/>
Erik Naggum
| And all I'm saying is, do we really want to work for the forces of darkness?
I think that should be a personal decision. It would be better for all
of us if we did not have to check with what "we" want before each of us
can make a personal decision, and consequently it would be nice if those
who do not want something at least do not block the way for those who do.
| I have taken many tests in my life, and done quite well on most all of
| them, and I have never seen one that measures much of anything other than
| the ability to do well on that particular test. I know that this is a
| trite observance, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Tests are not useful for what they measure, but for how what they measure
correlates with other things. If some foot size happened to correlate
well with programmer proficiency, one could measure foot size and get
high programmer proficiency for no better reason than that other people
with the same foot size had high proficiency as programmers; one would
not measure proficiency as such. Even if foot size correlated weakly
with programmer proficiency, like 75% chance of getting a good programmer
with some foot size, it could still be more valuable than anything else
that had a lower correlation coefficient.
J L Russell
"Erik Naggum" <er...@naggum.no> wrote in message news:32453415...@naggum.no...
> * J L Russell
> | And all I'm saying is, do we really want to work for the forces of darkness?
>
> I think that should be a personal decision. It would be better for all
> of us if we did not have to check with what "we" want before each of us
> can make a personal decision, and consequently it would be nice if those
> who do not want something at least do not block the way for those who do.
>
exhortation, not a suggestion for prescriptive injunction.
> | I have taken many tests in my life, and done quite well on most all of
> | them, and I have never seen one that measures much of anything other than
> | the ability to do well on that particular test. I know that this is a
> | trite observance, but that doesn't make it any less true.
>
> Tests are not useful for what they measure, but for how what they measure
> correlates with other things. If some foot size happened to correlate
> well with programmer proficiency, one could measure foot size and get
> high programmer proficiency for no better reason than that other people
> with the same foot size had high proficiency as programmers; one would
> not measure proficiency as such. Even if foot size correlated weakly
> with programmer proficiency, like 75% chance of getting a good programmer
> with some foot size, it could still be more valuable than anything else
> that had a lower correlation coefficient.
>
Nor do I disagree with this. Of course there is a weak correlation between, say,
SAT scores and 'scholastic aptitude', and such a test might have utility when you
are trying to screen thousands of people for thousands of openings.
Others have pointed out that Lisp projects tend toward small numbers of
programmers as opposed to cadres of mercenaries that Java encourages.
I would argue that no arbitrary third-party certification test is going to give you
as high a correlation to the skills that you are looking for as a small panel of
competent people asking questions, face-to-face, that they think are relevant to
their needs.
Reliance on such a test simply shows that there is no one of suitable competence
in an organization to either judge the worth (or lack thereof) of such a test or
devise their own test that correlates better to their own needs.
It seems to me that reliance on mass statistical analysis in this case is losing
vis-a-vis common-sense interpersonal judgement and intuition.
But that's just my intuition.
-James Russell
Christopher C. Stacy
Kenny> As it stands, CL gets laughed out of the running in IT, because the
Kenny> immune system identifies us as "not-ready-for-IT".
Thing is, I am not at all sure that I believe this claim.
Harald Hanche-Olsen
| This is somewhat like voting for people to lead a country. The
| United States is /really/ paying the price for its plurality
| system during this presidential period. For some reason, how many
| people would like something the most is regarded as a reason to
| choose it. I favor a system where the number of people who like
| something the /least/ is subtracted from the number of people who
| like it the most, or generally, a system where each candidate is
| given positive and negative scores in some small range (where the
| sum of the absolute value of all scores is constant or has a fixed
| upper limit) and those you feel nothing about gets zero or no vote
| at all. The scores are simply summed and whoever gets the highest
| total score wins.
This is probably equivalent to a system in which every voter has a
fixed number of (positive) points to distribute among candidates as he
wishes: Just add a constant to the points awarded by each voter in
your system to see this. Such systems are prone the same kind of
paradoxes that plague all the more conventional systems in
existence. These paradoxes are similar to, but not the same as,
Arrow's theorem, which is often interpreted as saying that perfect
democracy is impossible.
Anyway, I think a better way to achieve what you want (though not
paradox free - no fair voting system can be paradox free) is the
single transferrable vote. Each voter ranks all candidates. If one
candidates is ranked first on more than half of the ballots, he
wins. Otherwise, the candidate who is ranked first on the smallest
number of ballots is thrown out of the race, all the ballots are
adjusted accordingly, and the procedure starts from the top. (If N
candidates are to be elected, the requirement for being elected is to
have at least a proportion 1/(N+1) of the votes. Also, the ballots
that helped elect a winning candidate are put back in the pile of
ballots, albeit with a reduced weight. This case gets a bit more
complex.) If the latest US presidential election had been run this
way, one can imagine many voters ranking the candidates Nader, Gore,
Bush. Presumably there would be enough Nader+Gore votes to stop Bush
from winning outright; then since Nader would probably have the
smallest set of votes, he would be out of the race, most of his votes
would have gone for Gore instead, and Gore would win.
With an election system like this, it would be impossible for the
candidate of the largest minority to win, if he is uniformly loathed
by all the other minorities.
To get this if not back on topic, or at least a bit less off topic,
some of the problems underlying the difficulties of designing good
voting systems could equally well apply to the case of selecting one
of three job applicants A, B, and C, where after a careful evaluation
one finds that A is better than B, B better than C, and C better than
A - if what you're doing is ranking them according to at least three
different criteria, then just counting by how many criteria each
applicant is ranked higher than each of the others. Say, by their
intelligence (to the extent that you can gauge it) you rank them
A-B-C; but by their knowledge you rank them B-C-A, while by their
reliability you rank them C-A-B. Now A beats B in two of the three
criteria, while B beats C and C beats A in the same way.
--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- Yes it works in practice - but does it work in theory?
Craig Brozefsky
> I have, and I can't say I heard anyone talking about
> certification. otoh, i did know one IT recruiter who thought some guy
> was a genius because he had passed a wadge of MS exams in short order
> (an Asian!).
I don't quite understand this repeated reference to "Asians" with
regards to certification. What is the significance? I have worked
with "Asians" of various backgrounds and nationalities, both within
the U.S. and abroad, and I'm unable to discern this connection that
keeps popping up here.
--
Sincerely,
Craig Brozefsky <cr...@red-bean.com>
Free Scheme/Lisp Software http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
Erik Naggum
| Others have pointed out that Lisp projects tend toward small numbers of
| programmers as opposed to cadres of mercenaries that Java encourages.
This means that you need a lot more than your regular certification.
Which is why I think giving a paper at a conference is a good start.
Erik Naggum
| This is probably equivalent to a system in which every voter has a fixed
| number of (positive) points to distribute among candidates as he wishes:
| Just add a constant to the points awarded by each voter in your system to
| see this.
Not quite. There are two differences. The first is what the absence of
a vote means. In a system with negative scores, absence means zero. In
a system with a skewed scale, absence of votes is generally not tolerated
and voters have to give scores to every candidate. This is known to fail
miserably because once you ask people to rate things below the "don't
care" limit, their score values are completely random. It is therefore
important to let voters decide not to score a particular candidate, and
that the system give such a zero value, which is the second difference.
The Borda system, which gives more points to the most values and zero to
the least valued specifically requires that each candidate gets scored.
| Such systems are prone the same kind of paradoxes that plague all the
| more conventional systems in existence.
The no-vote-means-zero-score rule removes a significant number of
problems, but not all.
| Anyway, I think a better way to achieve what you want (though not paradox
| free - no fair voting system can be paradox free) is the single
| transferrable vote. Each voter ranks all candidates.
This is a huge problem. Voters must be allowed /not to care/ about the
relative ranking of candidates on whom they have no opinion. Forcing
voters to care about these candidates is known to produce lots of noise.
Is this article you have read? http://www.sciencenews.org/20021102/bob8.asp
Kenny Tilton
> Kenny Tilton <kti...@nyc.rr.com> writes:
>
>
>>I have, and I can't say I heard anyone talking about
>>certification. otoh, i did know one IT recruiter who thought some guy
>>was a genius because he had passed a wadge of MS exams in short order
>>(an Asian!).
>
>
> I don't quite understand this repeated reference to "Asians" with
> regards to certification. What is the significance? I have worked
> with "Asians" of various backgrounds and nationalities, both within
> the U.S. and abroad, and I'm unable to discern this connection that
> keeps popping up here.
>
It's a deliberately politically incorrect joke derived from a laughing
assertion by -- you guessed it -- one of my best friends, an Asian, viz,
"We just memorize the book!"
Did you hear the one about the Ebonics spelling contest?
Tim Bradshaw
> And all I'm saying is, do we really want to work for the forces of
> darkness?
We'd like to get paid, yes.
--tim
Tim Bradshaw
> As it stands, CL gets laughed out of the running in IT, because the
> immune system identifies us as "not-ready-for-IT". Maybe if we adorn
> ouselves with a few ITish proteins like certification the immune
> system will think we are friend, not foe.
You are right. However I think the reason CL gets laughed about is
not really lack of certification, it's a deeper malaise. The problem
is that there is a huge gap between the way Lisp is typically
presented and what CL is actually like:
CL: advanced but industrial language, designed by people with
experience of large real-world systems (like operating systems
deployed outside academia &c). Has rejected many `research
language' ideas in favour of clear implementability (hence: no
call/cc, no mandatory TRO, no standard MOP), and so on. Has left
in plenty of `hacky old' stuff so that existing programs could be
got to run. Has GO TO. Language purity a non-goal. CL is an
enormous compromise with the aim being an implementable system
which will support large programs. And it does *really well* at
this: better than any other language I know. CL is the Java of
Lisp. Programming language purists almost universally hate CL.
Lisp presentation: random AI academic who once knew a little bit
of maclisp waves their arms about Lisp and says a bunch of random
stuff, about 80% of which is wrong, and the other 40% is bogus AI
crap[1]. In the advanced course, students are shown a large
program written by this academic. The only data types it uses are
lists and symbols (except he (it is always a he) explains that
they are lists and atoms). It implements it's own rational number
package because sponge lisp didn't have rationals in 1979. It's
all in one package (if the package is mentioned it is called USER
not CL-USER). Error handling is done by writing the form to be
evaluated to a file, cranking up the system to load the file and
write output to another file, and checking this second file for
the string `Err'. The program is loaded by catting all the source
files together and loading that file. It can not be run compiled
(lisp has no compiler, after all), and makes prolific use of EVAL.
It runs on an old version of kcl, breaking on akcl or any more
recent Lisp. The indentation style is unconventional but is
presented as the correct way of indenting programs. Comments are
in Latin and bad Urdu.
After presenting this system, the academic goes on to present his
new system which has been written in C++ by some spare PhD
students he had lying around. Unfortunately although this system
is far better, it isn't quite finished yet and it tends to core
dump a lot (like: core dump is all it will actually do). Some
small soon-to-be-solved issues to do with memory allocation mean
that it currently uses rather more memory than the old system.
It's currently being reimplemented in Java, and the parts of it
which rely on cranking up the old system every time it needs to
actually do anything are being redone in perl. Comments are now
in middle english.
After the presentation of the new system, students who hang around
will be accosted by a particularly haggard looking PhD student,
who explains that the demo they actually saw was done by a
reimplementation of the system in a few hundred lines of modern CL
that a couple of the PhD students cooked up over a weekend. Over
half of this new, working, system consists of code to replicate
the idiosyncratic messages from the old system, in particular the
incorrect printing of numbers in English (they tried using ~R, but
it got things right). One of the students who implemented this new
system tried to present it to the academic, but emerged white &
shaking from his office, and left the university shortly
afterwards without completing a PhD. No one else has dared raise
the issue, so instead they struggle on with the Java/Perl version,
which is now 35,000 lines, and in the process of being converted
(again) to work in the current Java version.
You think I'm joking, don't you? I wish I was. If I'm a random
manager who might consider using Lisp, I'm likely either to remember
something like the above, or ask some minion who will. Because, like
it or not, this *is* how Lisp is presented in academia. Is it
surprising that it doesn't get used as much as it might do? We need
to do something about this.
I don't think certification is the answer, and neither do I think
giving papers (the academic has *lots* of published papers on his
system!) helps much. We need to change how CL is taught, and if we
can't do that (and I can't see a way other than killing most of the
current AI academics) we need to do a huge amount of work to present
CL as a serious, industrial system, so that it is easy to point people
at examples of Lisp being used industrially, and so they can find
books and web pages describing how well it supports this. *Then*
certification might help.
--tim
Footnotes:
[1] You think this doesn't add up? Read on...
Pascal Costanza
> I don't think certification is the answer, and neither do I think
> giving papers (the academic has *lots* of published papers on his
> system!) helps much. We need to change how CL is taught, and if we
> can't do that (and I can't see a way other than killing most of the
> current AI academics) we need to do a huge amount of work to present
> CL as a serious, industrial system, so that it is easy to point people
> at examples of Lisp being used industrially, and so they can find
> books and web pages describing how well it supports this. *Then*
> certification might help.
I don't if this could be relevant but you may check out
http://www.cs.unca.edu/~manns/intropatterns.html for some food for thought.
Pascal
--
Pascal Costanza University of Bonn
mailto:cost...@web.de Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de Römerstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)
J L Russell
"Tim Bradshaw" <t...@cley.com> wrote in message news:ey365vd...@cley.com...
So, Philip Morris, RJR, BAT, etc. approaches you (pl.) and says,
"Look, we know that lisp is the most effective tool around.
We want you to design a system that consolidates all our
research on increasing addictiveness of cigarettes and
marketing them to children in order to help us design
a more effective strategy."
You think, wow, we're so desperate, we'll take anything.
I don't know about you (pl.), but I'd rather go on the dole.
My utility to society would be _increased_ that way.
-James Russell
Tim Bradshaw
> So, Philip Morris, RJR, BAT, etc. approaches you (pl.) and says,
> "Look, we know that lisp is the most effective tool around.
> We want you to design a system that consolidates all our
> research on increasing addictiveness of cigarettes and
> marketing them to children in order to help us design
> a more effective strategy."
> You think, wow, we're so desperate, we'll take anything.
So, IBM, Sun, Cisco etc. approaches you (pl.) and says,
"Look, we know that lisp is the most effective tool around.
We want you to design a system that consolidates all our
research on increasing reliability of systems and
marketing them to professionals in order to help us design
a more effective strategy."
You think, wow, how cool is that, we'll definitely take that.
Or, I guess, in your case `whoa, evil capitalist scum, stay back!'.
Marc Spitzer
news:mXvx9.45038$Mb3.2...@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net:
Many people I know would call working fo a goverment the "forces of
darkness", for example working for the NSA, or Exxon. You had to find
the worst possable interpitation( it is illegal) of this and then use it
as a public insult. What inspired you to behave as such an ass?
marc
J L Russell
"Tim Bradshaw" <t...@cley.com> wrote in message news:ey3heex...@cley.com...
On the other hand, I would want to ask what are the ultimate goals
of this company, at what cost, and how much would I be helping to
further them. Do they want to make a profit by selling useful
goods and services, or by poisoning people? Do they sell latter-day
Hollerith tabulators to latter-day Nazis? Do they aim to become a
monopoly and subvert the good aspects of capitalism? Do they
aim to buy the organs of education and government and hold humanity
in thrall in their furturistic dystopia?
Sure, they haven't done a good job so far, but do I want to help them?
-James Russell
J L Russell
"Marc Spitzer" <mspi...@optonline.net> wrote in message news:Xns92BC6A31F585Cms...@167.206.3.3...
I'm not sure what your point is about the government and Exxon.
Change 'children' to 'adult' if you like, no longer illegal, not much less immoral.
Who did I insult?
Tim answered my trite, non-specific rhetorical question with what I saw as a non-serious,
non-specific answer.
I responded with another example, not aimed at anyone in particular,
which Tim admirably countered.
If you took it personally, that's not my problem.
If you happen to market cigarettes to children, I stand by what I said.
I apparently underestimated how seriously people take this.
I thought we were debating philosophy here, not flinging insults.
You were the first to call anyone in particular a name.
-James