librarians should be scripters

(dis)content management writes

originally from a private forum, reproduced here by request.  it’s commentary on this article about librarians as coders.

In general, I disagree with that diagram. There’s a level *below* application called ’system,’ and it isn’t in that diagram because IBM wants to sell you systems that you write your applications on.

...

However, the graph is also missing a column called ‘Deployment,’ which comes after Development. This is where ‘Scripting’ comes in. ‘Scripting’ is the process of writing code to retrieve and manipulate information from the system, and also changing the state of the system.

I just want to mention that the one and only point of the diagram I chose was to illustrate that there are more roles in the process of system development than just "business / librarian" and "coder".  There are lots of much more complicated diagrams (including many from IBM) that present a much more accurate picture of system development; I chose the simplest one that met my needs.

That being said, I do think there is a useful distinction to be made between application developer/coder and scripter.  I do think that there is more value for librarians in learning lighter-weight scripting languages, particularly JavaScript, than in trying to duplicate the depth of knowledge and programming complexity associated with being e.g. a trained C++ applications developer.  Scripting lets you glue existing systems together in interesting ways - I suspect that is most often what librarians want, rather than the ability to develop entire systems from scratch.

UPDATE 2005-Dec-21: Incidentally, the forum discussion is from forum.optica8.com - Conferences - Online Northwest, and it's unprivate enough that I can read it, anyway.