A Generation Lost in the Bazaar • Hacker News Board

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#111

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:48 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #60

phkamp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I as a FreeBSD person not be allowed to lambast the worst hack-on-hack-on-hack-on-hack I have to suffer ? And trust me, libtool is replaceable, all it takes an agreement about a compiler and loader flag for producing shared libraries and you suddenly don't need it at all.

But that agreement would be based on our current best understanding of how computers should work. When you factor in the future (and evolving an existing codebase is a huge problem) we have to assume any understanding we have now is incomplete and flawed. 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.

[deleted]

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#112

Post by phkamp » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:49 PM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #104

phkamp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

InstallShield was a created by a startup, to give windows-apps a non-insane way of installing themselves.

Microsoft was forced to buy them, almost at gunpoint, by 3rd. party software developers.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#113

Post by jballanc » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:51 PM UTC

anu_gupta wrote: post #103

jballanc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder why you think that? I suspect it might be related to the focus on "consumer-centric" (as opposed to geek-centric) features. That is one interesting side-effect of the bazaar model: it's great at building what the majority want. If you are trying to build something that nobody is asking for, you can't beat the cathedral model! ;-)

I will tell you, though, that Snow Leopard missed its ship date by 8 months (of course, you never heard about that because Apple is smarter than to announce an OS ship date before it goes GM). It was also nearly un-usable for about a month, and only marginally usable for two months beyond that, during development. Lion suffered from none of these issues...

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#114

Post by phkamp » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #110

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 m…

Windows and Office are actually not examples of cathedrals, because the architectural focus of Microsoft was not on software but on a near-monopoly market.

You diagnosis of its qualities are spot on.

"ad hominem" means to "attack the man", ie: I single identified man, saying some generalities about identifiable groups is not "ad hominem".

And yes, I am a grump old man, and a surprisingly cheerful one at that.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#115

Post by chwahoo » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:57 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #51

chwahoo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it matter who you are? I've tried to respond to what you wrote. Why do you think most of the software we build now is like putting a man on the moon? I think it's nothing like that. Maybe I should read Brook's book (I've enjoyed MMM), but your article doesn't make a strong case for it.

> Why does it matter who you are? I've tried to respond to what you wrote. Because you claim he's attacking open source software, and you said that maybe he thinks MS is the standard bearer of his cause. The (easy to find) facts are that he has committed a lot of code to open source and has been involved in freeBSD for many years. These are not small trivial bits of code used by a few people or for insignificant reas…

If the author's open-source credentials are part of his argument, then he needs to make them part of the story he tells in his article. He shouldn't assume that people will connect the dots (he doesn't have the name recognition of a Torvalds or Stallman). Further, even with the context, I don't think the dots add up to enough of a picture to understand what he's arguing for/against.

To make a convincing argument, he should have made it clearer what he was arguing against ("the bazaar" is too nebulous and refers to many things, .com development refers to other things) and what he was arguing for (which was entirely missing, other than a reference to Brooks' book). If he doesn't have a clear vision of how development should work (or a "standard-bearer"), he should have at least provided some examples of things working the "right" way (or better).

He should probably also have left off a bunch of the insults and hyperbole: "clueless" / "hacks" / .com period a "disaster" for code quality. I'm frankly pretty surprised that ACM Queue would publish this.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#116

Post by jballanc » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:57 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #32

tjr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some software is extensively designed up front, like embedded avionics programs. The resources are made available because folks like the FAA demand it. Why don't we employ rigorous software engineering principles to, say, iOS games? It would be a waste. It could be done, but in practice, people just don't care as much if a game on their phone crashes as they do if an airplane they're riding in crashes. There's a wide…

You are not even in the same zip code as the point I'm trying to make, which, I guess, sort of makes my point. Nobody says you have to write iOS games using the same methodology as avionics, what somebody is trying to say is that random walk will only get you so far... iOS is a pretty bad example btw, because iOS is very much a Cathedral and has a designer and architect who cares and who is in control. That's precise…

iOS, and most of the stuff that comes out of Apple other than the hardware, does not have a single designer. This is one of the greatest myths that Jobs promulgated. He did not hand down directives from on high. Quite the opposite. He waited for new ideas to come from his engineers, then he would wield veto, but that's all.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#117

Post by anu_gupta » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:59 PM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #113

anu_gupta wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder why you think that? I suspect it might be related to the focus on "consumer-centric" (as opposed to geek-centric) features. That is one interesting side-effect of the bazaar model: it's great at building what the majority want. If you are trying to build something that nobody is asking for, you can't beat the cathedral model! ;-) I will tell you, though, that Snow Leopard missed its ship date by 8 months (of…

For me, it's stuff like my quad core iMac becoming unusable under heavy disk activity, or issues like scrolling web pages being impossible when running (quasi) full screen video in a dual monitor setup, or mouse lag under ML.

Minor irritations like reworked Spaces and full screen mode making a second monitor pointless are irritations, but I wouldn't regard them as reflective of the quality of Lion and ML.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#118

Post by peterwwillis » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 3:00 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #112

peterwwillis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

InstallShield was a created by a startup, to give windows-apps a non-insane way of installing themselves. Microsoft was forced to buy them, almost at gunpoint, by 3rd. party software developers.

Cool. Now if only FOSS would adopt a non-insane way of installing software...

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#119

Post by sedev » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 3:02 PM UTC

"Quality happens only when someone is responsible for it."

I admire that as an example of good headline-writing: it tells you one of the important points that the article wants to make. I find it interesting to read this piece in light of recent discussions about Worse-Is-Better vs. The-Right-Thing: I read PHK as arguing definitely from a The Right Thing perspective. I find his argument appealing, but I'm not entirely sure that I'm persuaded by it. On the appealing side, I look at Apple, Python, and emacs: things I use every day, things shaped unmistakeably by someone with vision, authority, and taste, and think that there's got to be something to this argument.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#120

Post by lifeisstillgood » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 3:03 PM UTC

__alexs wrote: post #33

phkamp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean: "In 2001 we reinvented XP/Agile because we couldn't be bothered to read the old literature to see if somebody else had done something like that before" ?

I don't think that's quite fair on Fowler. C&B was published only 2 years before his book on XP, The Toyota Way was published in 2001 as well. Really many of ideas which we've come to associate with "Agile"-like methods only really started to become codified about the end of the 1980's in more traditional manufacturing. I don't think it's too surprising that it's taken the software industry another 10 years for this…

I am afraid that the principles of Agile was clearly espoused by Tom Gilb in 1988, long before the Manifesto etc. He called it Evolutionary Programming but it is pretty much Scrum.

see: Tom Gilb Principles of Software Engineering Management (1988)

We do have an awful tendancy to reinvent the wheel, but I think that building Cathedrals vs building Bazaars is the wrong metaphor - I prefer building simple vs building complicated.

The "bad" people PHK describe are building complicated. The "good" people build as simple as possible, but no simpler.

edit: 1992. Only been building bungalows.