From: Benjohn Barnes <benjohn@...>
Date: 2006-03-29T08:14:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Black Belt


On 28 Mar 2006, at 23:03, Jeppe Jakobsen wrote:

> Hey if people is against an exam, why not make it more like a test  
> so that
> people and especially newbies (like me!) would know on which areas to
> improve themselves?
> I've seen such a test for C++, and I thought it was a really great  
> tool.

If you're not aware of it, you may get a lot from: http:// 
www.rubyquiz.com/

Certainly, the language tests I've done have seemed to be a terrible  
representation of my abilities (and I'm not just bitter about being  
bad at them, as I've generally done well :). For instance, in c++,  
they'd generally ask lots of ridiculous detail about totally obscure  
sections of the language (oooh, bit fields, and exactly what happens  
when you do all sorts of things that any good book will strongly warn  
you against - basically, questions that if you need to know the  
answer to, you're almost certainly doing something in an  
inappropriate manner). At the same time, they tend to miss out on  
more useful things like "do you know what the STL and Boost are, and  
why they're good".

I think everyone I know with any kind of "official" certification for  
being competent with a technology believes it to be a total waste of  
time. Useful for getting the odd job, but otherwise pointless.

:) But I've got to say, I'm not sure why I have an irrational dislike  
of the idea of Ruby certification. Maybe a simple one would be having  
a gem up on rubyforge :) And your "score" could be the number of  
downloads it gets :) So I'm a zero and a zero so far...