Although Emacs knowledge is not relevent to OpenACS development
per-se, it
can be relevent for the sort of questions Malte is
asking. There are two possible uses for such a survey:
- Finding out what specific relevent skills candidates know and
don't know, so as to tailor the curriculum to the students.
- Screen the candidates to get an idea of who's smart enough (or
whatever other requirements you have) to accept into your program.
Those are two very different uses, but note that Emacs and/or general
text editor questions could still be useful for both, though for
different reasons.
In the second case above, asking, "Do you use Emacs? How do you do
XYZ in Emacs?" is potentially very useful, as there is probably a
quite high correlation between people who use Emacs, and especially
people who use it productively (know how to do search and replace,
regexp, use the kill ring not the mouse, etc.), and the type of
students you want to have.
For people like Roberto, you can make your "is he smart?" survey more
powerful by adding a second question, "If you don't use Emacs, what
text editor(s) do you typically use? How do you accomplish XYZ in
your editor of choice?", which should also tell you something useful.
Note that none of these are yes/no answers, and they aren't going to
be entirely reliable, they could just help you get a feel for who you
want to invest training time in.
Look at it this way: Some people will click 10 different widgets in
Word, over and over again, dozens of times every day, and never ask
themselves, "Is there a better way to do this?" They know what they
know and they're happy with it, don't confuse them with improvements.
This person is unlikely to be a good candidate - where by candidate, I
presume to mean someone who is able to become a good OpenACS
programmer. Not that it's impossible - there probably
are good programmers like that, somewhere, but IMNSHO it's
unlikely to see those two traits come together in one person.
For the first part of the survey, well, it could still be very nice to
have a "tips and tricks for programmers" sidebar to your class, where
the learned wizened instructors share some favorite tips timesavers
with the newbies. :) Sometimes little things can make a big
difference. E.g., when I first started using Emacs, I did a whole
three week aD bootcamp without realizing that the Emacs kill ring
(copy/paste buffer) could hold more than one string at a time! Five
seconds to learn how to use it, weeks before I realized (by looking in
a manual) that it was there to use.
