The Microsoft people get to waive their shiny certificates in employers faces, so I'm wondering if companies that need a project done, and haven't decided what language it's going to be done in get swayed by this? In my opinion a lot of the stuff done on sites in .net should be perl/cgi.
  But if I'm puting forward a proposal against some .net people and they have their shiny pieces of paper I'm very sure this has an effect on who they choose to go with (although I do get to laugh when they later decide to change servers to Linux and hit problems).

  Although I know from your previous posts that you are quite against it, if anyone were in a good position to make such a thing (or things) it would be you.
  Why not "Learning Perl exam certified", "Intermediate Perl exam certified" or something akin. Or broken down further into say 10 or more modules covering different area's, so employers could get an idea if the candidate had the right Perl knowledge for the job (CGI, SysAdmin, Linux, Win32, etc).

  Would you consider asking Larry if he'd
bless $randal_certification_modules;

I think free certification would cause problems, why not have it cheap, and all monies (minus running costs) go toward the development of Perl 6?

P.S. I've been reading your books, after learning from other books that I thought were good, you're learning Perl book alone has taught me many things I should have already known. I wish I started with it in the first place, and am looking forward to reading Intermediate Perl (should be onto that one in a week).

Lyle

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update: I don't think certification will be the single solution to making Perl more accepted. But I do believe that it will go a long way toward doing so.

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