A Generation Lost in the Bazaar • Hacker News Board

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#101

Post by TylerE » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:39 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #20

norswap wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doesn't change the fact that it's terrible and that better alternative exist (for instance, CMake), thereby making it yet another cruft from the past.

The bazaar is perfectly capable of adopting improvements that prove themselves, and eliminating cruft from the past, if the cost is worth it . See the recent systemd fuss. If CMake really is better then eventually all important projects will shift over to it, and distributions will stop installing autoconf by default, or eventually at all. The fact that this hasn't happened already tells us that the practical differe…

Disagree.

The bazaar model SUCKS at getting rid of cruft. New stuff gets added sure, but old dependencies never seem to go away. It's just accretion. The prevailing attitude is that "hard drive space is cheap."

This inevitable leads to calcification and the perpetuation of sub-par solutions, like auto-crap. It get used because "everything else uses it".

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#102

Post by typicalrunt » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:42 PM UTC

There's an element to that article that is complaining about the process that Unix took to get to where it stands now. I feel the author needs to skim some books on evolution to see that there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach.

For instance, his example of Unix is not unlike any large organism who, through years of evolution, has many structures that are no longer needed (e.g. appendix) or structures that seem unnecessarily complex (e.g. recurrent laryngeal nerve) when our 20/20 hindsight can design a better solution.

I didn't find too much advice in the article, but I wish he had proposed something better. Even life can potentially create a mutant that contains no archaic structures in it, but it will only last if it passes a fitness test. Why doesn't he try rewriting some of the gnarled pieces of Unix code to make it better (like removing the need for autoconf)?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#103

Post by anu_gupta » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:43 PM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #93

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…

First: Have you ever looked at a plot of people for/against mariage rights for gays vs age? I suspect that the clear divergence does exist, but may not mean what you think it means... Second: I worked on OS X. In fact, I worked on Snow Leopard, and the start of Lion. What's interesting about that, is that Snow Leopard was the last version of OS X developed according to the "Cathedral" model. Also, while the Snow Leop…

It's interesting that a lot of people (myself included) think that Snow Leopard is a better OS than both Lion and Mountain Lion.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#104

Post by peterwwillis » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:43 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #87

peterwwillis wrote: post #84

It seems like FOSS and Unix-related software development was never held accountable to customers so it never made uniformity - or even reliability - a requirement. If something doesn't work, it's not my fault! It's one of the thousands of other products I depend upon that aren't shipped with an operating system that's to blame. It worked for me is the cry of the guilty developer. You'll notice that Windows developmen…

You're not old enough to remember how "InstallShield" came about, are you ? :-)

Nope. Care to enlighten?

(Regardless of what may have prompted its development, its use since around 1992 doesn't really discredit my point... It takes care of things for the user that FOSS doesn't deal with, or at least not in a portable way)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#105

Post by pasbesoin » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:43 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #89

pasbesoin wrote: post #75

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 messa…

The editors put in that reference, the essay was available before the book was published.

Fair enough. But a reader not familiar with this is going to wonder. (Maybe none, given that this is in the ACM Queue.)

Maybe the following edit?

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

P.S. Done reading now. Enjoyed/appreciated your essay. Amongst other things, perhaps useful for the younger / newer to the technology generation to appreciate where this "configure soup" comes from.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#106

Post by chimi » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:44 PM UTC

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…

I think a lot of people, especially around here, eschew college education in the computer sciences, because you can get a job without it and you can build a website without it, but I really think the decline of formal education in computer programming concepts has led to a lack of cathedral thinking.

Of course, I'm biased, because I have such a degree. However, when I compare what I build to what is built by a business school grad who thinks anyone can learn computers, so everyone should be taught business, I really cringe at loss of formality in the industry.

Needing to build a computer processor from AND and OR gates really drives the concepts home. Building an operating system in C++ really drives the concepts home and creates a framework for thinking about computer based problem solving that's lost in many of the systems I look at today.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#107

Post by hollerith » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:47 PM UTC

Thanks, phkamp, for the best explanation I've seen for why I switched from Linux to OS X. I was employed in an IT job before 1990.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#108

Post by phkamp » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:47 PM UTC

wtvanhest wrote: post #100

phkamp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is probably a good way to filter through the million monkeys. But some topics would require entire books to present in a context free way, this is one of them, and I don't have the time and money to write that book, so you will have to make do with a column @ACM. When I read something, and have the nagging feeling that there is context I'm missing, I go looking for that context, usually starting with "who th…

I enjoyed your post, but I also understand why people hated it. They hated it because you presented an idea that is completely at odds with the way many HN readers think. Then, rather than sitting back and watching the discussion you became offended and went on an aggressive warpath. You didn’t even consider that what I wrote was meant as a complement to the fact that you are taking a view that no one else currently…

That is not an insult in my book.

To me it means: If you're happy what you're doing, then who am I to tell you're wrong ?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#109

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:48 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #24

chwahoo wrote: post #15

This article reads like an old timer feeling left behind by the current rate of progress who thinks that the problem is really that the rest of the world is doing it all wrong. He's probably right that lots of software could be designed better, but I think he's wrong that that's of paramount importance. We need lots of software these days and we simply don't have the resources to built it to Kamp's standards. Also, w…

I wonder if you bothered to check who wrote that article, before you started speculating about things you could have found out with a few google searches ? You seem to assume that cathedrals are "slow-moving, centralized, big up-front" designs, where did you get that idea ? Ever looked into how USA put a man on the moon ? Maybe you should. Also: Read Brooks book, if you can.

> I wonder if you bothered to check who wrote that article,

I don't think the appeal to authority fallacy will fly here. We are all too smart for that.

You arguments should be evaluated for their coherence and, in the end, it really doesn't matter who you are or what you did if you are wrong.

To use your example, it doesn't matter if you are Von Braun himself. If you don't bring enough propellant for your descent engine, you'll still crash on the Moon.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#110

Post by toyg » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:48 PM UTC

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…

Pretty much all your arguments about the Cathedral model being superior fail in the face of the most common cathedrals known to man: Microsoft Windows and Office.

Their inscrutable beauty is buried under tons of libraries nobody will ever touch for fear of breaking 20 years of development efforts, exactly like what happens in the Unix world. Their move to the 64-bit world was painfully slower than what their fellow merchants accomplished in the Unix bazaar. They still provide compatibility layers for programs built with technologies that have been thought of as extinct, like monks still praying to the gods of ancient Greece. Whenever they went for the "total reuse" mantra, they built terrible and insecure specifications (DCOM) that still saddle us 20 years later. And let's not even talk about portability, which is anathema: to each his own Cathedral and his own Faith, touch ye not any unbelievers!

So yeah, making mistakes and keeping around the cruft is something every long-running IT project can experience. Unixes are, arguably, the longest of them all, so the ones that naturally tend to show it more. Besides, there's a whole new world of applications to be built out there, if we were rewriting libtool every three months we'd move even more slowly than we do now.

Oh, and I wish I could say your rant is unbefitting of professionals of your age, but I'm afraid it's actually quite matching the grumpy-old-man stereotype you're clearly striving for. Hey look, I can do ad-hominem too, and I was born in the late 70s!