A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

If you try too hard to design a rigid structure around anything, it can come back and bite you in the ass. Part of the reason why this seemingly disorganized and haphazard collection of buildings makes a working and thriving metropolis is because of its diversity and resilience to change and progress. If you attempt to over-engineer something of such complexity, you might just end up with Pyongyang instead of New York. Instead, we have a competing ecosystem of libraries and options with the good ones theoretically rising to the top. Better communities and communication of these values make this process work even better, just as in the greater economy. For all its complexity, this process works surprisingly well.

For all the explaining Kamp did in this article, the one thing he failed to account for was the resounding success of the current model. He did use a surprisingly apt metaphor, however. Cathedrals are no more; their old place as the center of society had to be explained by a series of myths and lies that placed ideals above reality. The thriving Bazaar easily replaced them at the center of any thriving modern city, based on the simple truth that the dynamic edge of reality was ever-changing, and that quality based on that reality would indeed be more successful.

Could it be better? Of course. But it is reality and truth that will move us forward—not mythology. Good riddance to cathedrals.

Crypto is a bad example to use. Crypto is hard. I don't want random people writing their own crypto, I want them to carefully use other crypto packages, after having spent a long time reading the documentation.

Copy pasting is better than creating their own from new, but still leaves them potentially open to weird edge cases, but now with a false sense of security because they copy pasted.

First: It would be a big help for this discussion, if we could have the informal convention that people who were employed in an IT job before 1990 marked their post. I think it would show a quite clear divergence of attitude.

Second: It's very obivious, that a lot of you have never been anywhere near the kind of software project posited in the "cathedral" meme, instead you project into the word whatever you have heard or feel or particularly hate. That's not very helpful, given that there is an entire book defining the concept (I belive it's available online on ESR's homepage, how about you read it ?)

Third: No, I'm not of the "either you are with us, or you are against us" persuation. The bazaar is here to stay, but having everybody in need of transportation buy the necessary spareparts to build a car is insane.

Fourth: Related to point two really: A lot of you seem to have little actual ambition of making things better, I guess that is what happens if you grow up in a bazaar and never even experience a cathedral. I pity you.

That's why things like libtool or autoconf evolved (or, better, were "iteratively designed") to be able to grow and encompass varying and different goals.