Bug in ports howto question

[Allan Bowhill]

On  0, Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
:Allan,
:
:I'm not sure if your understanding of the term is wrong, or your 
:understaning
:of programming/sysadmin is wrong, but:
:
:The definition you give of "mutually exclusive" is correct.  Your contention
:that sysadmin and programming skillsets are mutually exclusive is completely
:unsupportable.  They aren't even orthogonal.  There are many times a 
:sysadmin
:resorts to writing quick scripts (programs) in order to do his job, and a
:programmer with no knowledge of sysadmin is going to write software that is
:impossible to administer.

Likewise, a systems administrator who writes quick scripts to fix things
is not doing "real" programming. This argument has been made to me on a
number of occasions by programmers.

There is some legitimacy to this statement. A programmer in a software
development environment has a completely different mindset than a
sysadmin in an Internet shop.

The reasons for writing code are different. The development process and
languages are different. The environment is different.

There are nuances of each type of job that require companies to
distinguish between the two occupations. Coursework to gain professional
skills is different.

In the practical day-to-day sense, there is a lot of overlap. But to say 
        systems administration == programming 
is false.


:Even your example of skiing/driving is wrong.  These two _are_ orthogonal
:(meaning they require separate skill sets not dependent on each other) but
:they are hardly even close to being mutually exclusive (which would mean 
:that
:you get to pick one to learn, because you can never then learn the other)
:I can prove this in the real world because I know people who can both ski
:and drive.

The analogy was not mine, and neither was that point. I did not say that
a person could not possess both skills.

My point was the skills themselves technically are exclusive to
one another. Not that someone couldn't have both.

:Fact is, I don't think it's possible for a skillset to be mutually exclusive
:with any other skillset.
:
:Philosophies could be.  A terrorist philosophy is multutally exclusive with
:a pacafist philosophy because you can not believe in killing to achieve your
:means at the same time you believe that violence is always wrong.
:
:Does this make sense?

Sure. A terrorist philosophy is in opposition to a pacifist philosophy.
I agree. But I am not saying systems administration is in opposition to
programming.

Unlike terrorists and pacifists, they can certainly complement one
another.

They just, in the pure sense, share little to nothing in common in and
of themselves.


:-- 
:Bill Moran
:Potential Technologies
:http://www.potentialtech.com
:
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-- 
Allan Bowhill
abowhill at blarg.net

You can always tell the Christmas season is here when you start getting
incredibly dense, tinfoil-and-ribbon- wrapped lumps in the mail.
Fruitcakes make ideal gifts because the Postal Service has been unable
to find a way to damage them.  They last forever, largely because
nobody ever eats them.  In fact, many smart people save the fruitcakes
they receive and send them back to the original givers the next year;
some fruitcakes have been passed back and forth for hundreds of years.

The easiest way to make a fruitcake is to buy a darkish cake, then
pound some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet.  Be sure to wear
safety glasses.
                -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"