If I received a CV that included Saint on Perl Monks or anything similar, it would move the person up the pile for sure.

But if you know what being a Saint on Perlmonks means, you would not work in HR. The sad fact is that HR people often don't have any clue about the business they work for, especially in larger companies.

I work in a small company, and even there, nobody except me has any clue what being a Perlmonks Saint means. I use Perl for automating stuff while building our software, and while the other developers can surely edit the mostly small scripts, nobody would write new Perl code. They lack the deeper understanding of the Perl culture. It's more like "Bambam hungry. Bambam hunts oink oink. Bambam eats oink oink. Bambam happy." No traces of Shakespeare, Jagger–Richards, or Lennon–McCartney, not even Kelly Bundy.

Alexander

But if you know what being a Saint on Perlmonks means, you would not work in HR

My company is not large enough to have an HR department so I decide who we hire and who we don't, usually with input from others.

Not having an HR person can be a bind, but mostly, it is a big relief...I'm not looking forward to the day that I delegate recruitment to someone else but that day will come if we are going to achieve our growth targets - *SiGH*

My company is not large enough to have an HR department so I decide who we hire and who we don't, usually with input from others

Even in large companies with a HR department, hiring of programmers should be done primarily at the team level. Being a Saint on Perl Monks is not a free pass. All applicants must be asked to write code and interact with future team members as part of the interview process.

See also: Re: Similarities of Perl and Python? (Interviewing References)

👁️🍾👍🦟

• You can easily become a saint without many meaningful posts, just by constant aggressive voting.
• Some of the worst (and dumbest) trolls here had pretty high ranking
• Duolingo is a trap. The primary aim of the Gamification is to make people addicted and an easy target for their ads. The content is automatically generated and not very didactic.

The content is automatically generated and not very didactic

Traditionally, this has not been the case. Real people put together the courses to produce quality learning. IMHO, there is a deeper issue with Duolingo. It teaches one to translate, not to understand the target language. Duolingo is great for getting started with a language but, in the absence of speaking with fluent speakers, other apps are needed to attempt to become fluent. That's why I use Rosetta Stone daily - it teaches only using the target language.

Just to second the notion, as a family member among several long-time active Duolingo users here.

The app is much better than portrayed above, and it serves the pareto principle:

You put really little time and effort in, but as you do it constantly, your vocabulary, sentence structure and understanding of idioms improves greatly, and if you also do the speaking trainings it offers, so does your ability to speak.

They don't pay me, I am no employee, the app runs w/o complaints in a browser with a working add-blocker, too.

So the one downside I see here is that it is not as good as immersing yourself physically in a foreign country for years. But then what is?

The other is that you up your screentime by the time you want to spend learning.

Cheers, Sören

Créateur des bugs mobiles - let loose once, run everywhere.
(hooked on the Perl Programming language)

Interesting .. I'm approaching a year on Duolingo, working on Italian, but the last few weeks I feel like it's running out of things to teach me. My reading comprehension is quite good, but I wouldn't be able to handle a simple conversation, and that's my goal -- to understand the spoken word and to be able to converse.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

Thanks PJ. We owe you so much. Groklaw -- RIP -- 2003 to 2013.

Too good to be true: …and yes, my last name is real… See also Luis von Ahn and Carnegie Mellon University, the place where some Lisps originally come from.

«The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»