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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#141

Post by [deleted] »

phkamp wrote: post #70
wtvanhest wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the nicest thing about HN for me is that I get to see my words evaluated on their own merit rather than what people know about me. HN has made me a better thinker and better communicator. Over the past year or so that I have contributed, I have clearly seen the way my thoughts diverge from the reality of what others believe. Sometimes I disagree and stop convincing people, other times I present arguments wh…

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…

[deleted]

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#142

Post by phkamp »

papsosouid wrote: post #127

How ironic that this complaint of poor quality and lowered standards comes from a FreeBSD developer who actively attacks people who care about producing quality software. Cathedral vs bazaar isn't the issue. It is simply putting quality as a priority vs not making it a priority. Which is why some cathedrals produce poor quality software (freebsd), and others produce high quality software (netbsd).

I do ?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#143

Post by SeanLuke »

IvarTJ wrote: post #126
jballanc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that evolution did put a man on the moon...unless you are one of those who don't believe humans are the result of 3 billion years of evolution? What you have to consider is that individual cells evolved, until they created a whole greater than themselves. No individual cell was in control of that first step Armstrong took onto the moon. Likewise, what we end up creating from so much "bazaar" development will a…

Right. Not never, but after 3 billion years.

And an incredible amount of energy from the Sun.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#144

Post by LaGrange »

phkamp wrote: post #114
toyg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not a cathedral because it was not on a software but a near-monopoly market? I love taking metaphors too far, so I'll just notice that "near-monopoly" is what cathedrals are all about.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#145

Post by chrisaycock »

chwahoo wrote: post #115
DanBC wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

PHK is one of the most prolific contributors to Queue. Most regular ACM readers know who he is.

> I'm frankly pretty surprised that ACM Queue would publish this.

Again, see above.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#146

Post by pmjordan »

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.

So what you're saying is that progressively tidying up a codebase to simplify fulfilling current requirements is always a bad idea because you might remove something that might make a hypothetical future requirement easier to fulfill?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#147

Post by roc »

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…

I think you're confusing two largely-unrelated issues.

Whether products are developed according to what users want vs what builders want has almost nothing to do with bazaar vs cathedral.

Indeed, many bazaar-style projects (the linux ecosystem in general, gimp, etc) are almost cautionary tales about "builders creating what they want for their own niche purposes and if anyone disagrees they're free to fork off".

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#148

Post by chawco »

chimi wrote: post #106
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 busine…

I'm going to go ahead and strongly disagree on this first point -- I've seen no correlation whatsoever between education background and propensity for strong system design. In fact, my background is mathematics with very little formal CS-related education and I'm firmly in the cathedral camp.

I really think it is a matter of exposure -- at one time all anyone ever saw were cathedrals, and so that was all anyone ever built. I feel now we've swung too far the other way, where there are many in the craft who've never seen a cathedral and have only known the bazaars. The reality is we need both, and the craft of building cathedrals is becoming endangered.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#149

Post by jeremyjh »

peterwwillis wrote: post #118
phkamp wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You mean like by having package managers that are built into the OS distribution that can install the applications you want with a single command?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#150

Post by randallsquared »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #121
jballanc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The majority wanted to have scrolling inverted?

No, the majority wanted to stop it from continuing to be inverted, as it has been for decades. If you do a significant percentage of your computing on a touchscreen, having the touchpad work the same way is really, really nice. After a few days of Lion, I switched all my other machines to do scrolling the same way. Now that I'm moving to Linux instead of Mountain Lion, I was happy to note that I can swap the up and down scroll with a simple command, and almost everything respects it (oddly, some things don't).
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