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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#71

Post by __alexs »

acdha wrote: post #65
phkamp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, autoconf happened because UNIX abandonned the cathedral model and went bazaar.

More accurately, it went multi-cathedral: major vendors were building temples to their self-perceived importance and unless you were a major customer they weren't interested in borrowing a better idea from someone else. The bazaar at least opened up the option for most users to have some influence over the process.

Indeed, the first "Free" UNIX was released in the early 90's. The UNIX fragmentation of the 80's doesn't really describe the Bazaar from C&B to me either.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#72

Post by sgift »

cs702 wrote: post #23
phkamp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... but evolution will also quite happily run you over a cliff which you have been avoided if intelligence were applied. Not to mention the fact that the bazaar is never going to put a man on the moon. And yes, I wrote that piece.

phkamp: "never" is a looong time. Who knows what the Bazaar can achieve through 'dumb' trial and error over the coming decades and centuries?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem comes to mind. Both efforts (cathedral and bazaar) have produced really useful software, but sometimes I have the feeling that the whole idea of "thinking about a problem" has been replaced by "hit the keyboard until something happens".

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#73

Post by phkamp »

zzzeek wrote: post #64
phkamp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about Microsoft ?

it's a prominent example of the "cathedral" model.

First, it's actually not, because their architecture is focused on architecting a market, not a computing solution.

Second, just because there is one bad example of a cathedral, doesn't mean the cathedral model is bad.

Many years ago, a fella named Gettys (look him up!) wrote as part of sage advice for OSS philosophy:

"The only thing worse than generalizing from one example, is generalizing from no example at all."

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#74

Post by lerouxb »

jng wrote: post #21

As someone who grew up as a programmer with assembly language, C, and C++, learning the good practices needed to make a 1 million lines of code C++ application work and be maintainable: I've been equally disgusted by the evolution of programming in the last few years. HTML - which is, to a first approximation, always invalid. JS - which needs jQuery to make it mostly-but-not-completely cross-compatible among browsers…

Nitpick: jQuery exists to make the HTML DOM manageable, not JavaScipt the language. (There are libraries targeted at javascript the language, but you could make an argument that that's the point of all libraries for all languages...)

I find jQuery more analogous to tools like configure and autoconf. (in that they aren't actually needed for "modern", standards compliant browsers.) As an example: there are already many lightweight drop-in replacements that assume a sane browser to begin with.

CSS is remarkably hack-free and the resets are just to remove the default styling that browsers have built in. Obviously browsers need builtin styles otherwise all the old pre-css pages would stop working.

And why are you calling programming languages and web servers hackish? How is nginx hackish and apache not? How is Objective C hackish and C++ not? Why stop inventing new languages at assembly, c or c++?

Other than that I generally agree with the rest of your comment. I think if we ever get to some kind of technological singularity we'll almost certainly and just about by definition not understand how it works. And true/strong AI would definitely be a singularity. Even if we understood version 1 we would likely not be able to understand whatever it dreams up 5 seconds after we overclock it. And we will - moor's law and all that. ;)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#75

Post by pasbesoin »

Thirteen years ago, Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly Media, 2001)

Off by two?

Seriously, though, how do you get 13 out of that (unless calculating from when the author conceivably began working on the book per se)?

I'm starting to read the article; I found mildly disconcerting that the first sentence appears to make a mis-statement, but I don't expect that to foreshadow the meat of the message. (We'll see. :-)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#76

Post by xaa »

phkamp wrote: post #58

OK, I'll make a couple of general observations here. 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, ins…

To reply to point three, which is the only one not containing an ad hominem...

There exist several larger OSS projects, such as Apache, Boost, the Kernel, etc, which accept contributions but are also curated. Thus they represent sort of hybrid between cathedral and bazaar. People who use these projects know they are getting some (varying) standard of quality.

I think these sorts of projects -- often shepherded by some kind of noncommercial Foundation or Organization -- are the best way to get a mix of openness and quality going forward.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#77

Post by pnathan »

lmm wrote: post #2

Autoconf is an easy target for these kind of rants, but you know what? It does its job, and it does it very well. The ratio of autoconf to non-autoconf programs on my system is probably 10:1, but the ratio of build problems is something like 1:20. If anyone ever managed to write a genuinely better build system, the bazaar would let it rise to the top; the gradual rise of e.g. cmake is testament to this. Trying to imp…

Interestingly, git just uses a makefile. no cmake/autoconf.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#78

Post by phkamp »

justincormack wrote: post #66

I think FreeBSD, and the Linux distributions do try to cater to too many different people, and quality and coherence suffers a lot from this. I think we can get past this though. The culture of testing and good code is on the ascendant again in many quarters. You need more people to understand build, packaging and distribution better, sure. You also need autotools to die, as the use cases for it are mainly dead. You…

nodding violently.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#79

Post by davidw »

phkamp wrote: post #58

OK, I'll make a couple of general observations here. 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, ins…

Why don't you talk about a few current "Cathedrals" and how they're different from "Bazaars", that might help the discussion too.

The only example that jumps out at me is the original Unix, and I think you'll agree that comparing software from 30 years ago that does vastly less than ... pretty much anything out there these days is not an entirely fair, nor useful comparison.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#80

Post by mikecane »

john61 wrote: post #8
mikecane wrote: post #3

I'm not a coder. And that piece illustrates why Maemo went nowhere with the general public and why Nokia's Internet Tablets failed. I tried to download software only to find out they required "dependencies." Then I had to chase those down. And once I did, I found the software to be buggy and unreliable -- and that's why people go buy iPads. They don't want to jump through so many hoops to get so little. The journey i…

Nokia Internet Tablet failed for the masses, because they did not invest in it. Instead they had an internal fight Symbian vs. Linux. Nobody won, instead Apple and Samsung did. BTW: Did you know that Maemo has an automatic Package Manager that resolves dependencies automatically?

You are getting into side issues here instead of the user experience. And such Package Management did not exist when I had the 770 -- at least if you were getting Maemo apps outside of whatever "curation" Nokia might have been attempting at the time.
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