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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#211

Post by jwm »

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…

> 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.

I think people do want to make things better, but its happening much more decentralized, with small teams taking small safe steps on tools, libraries & frameworks.

Media, on-line banking, 3d printing, accessible hardware hacking, e-commerce sites, scientific/engineering software. The majority of these things are made by small teams plugging the best libraries and platforms out there together, where they already solves part of their software problem. Android, Cloud, Linux etc. It would be silly to say these were without ambition and don't contribute to the community.

(The average software devs Impact Factor may be diluted by the increasing number of people working with computers, but computers are so globally useful its inevitable. If good things are still getting made then who cares.)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#212

Post by natep »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #155
jballanc wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not intended as an ad hominem as much as a reductio ad absurdum . It is frequently true that the views held by those older are also more likely to be correct, but it is not guaranteed. This is especially true when the views relate to social norms, views on which few people change as they get older. Cathedral vs Bazaar is probably as close to an argument of social norms as the software world gets...

My reading of PHK here is that Cathedrals often lead to better systems than the anarchy-bazaar that he feels has come to be most of the OSS world. I think bazaar's like the Turkish one referenced above (with guilds and standards of quality) are the best of all worlds. but to get there, a guild needs a strong, opinionated leader. Torvalds perhaps. (PHK seems to fit the bill too :-) So, what I suggest is the issue here…

I think Torvalds does that play that role, but only for the Linux kernel. For user-space, which OP focuses on, there isn't one.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#213

Post by papsosouid »

rbanffy wrote: post #210
papsosouid wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing keeping ls on your debian system is other packages having a dependency on it. There is no distinction between operating system and 3rd party packages, all of it is 3rd party packages. I have no idea where you are getting this weird notion about ls and where it was designed to run being a bug. I simply corrected an erroneous statement about what makes up a BSD operating system.

Why would it make a difference whether ls is part of the operating system or not? It works. And if, next week, I write a better ls, I can install it and use it.

Would you mind simply reading the thread? You are inventing an argument that does not exist. I did not make a value judgement, I corrected an erroneous statement. Nothing more.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#214

Post by randallsquared »

phkamp wrote: post #38
__alexs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think it's perfectly fair. UNIX was originally written as pair-programming. Brooks refers to agile in The Mythical Man-Month (he didn't invent it, check his references)

UNIX was originally written as pair-programming.

From http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/interview-with-ken-thomps... :

KT: I did the first of two or three versions of UNIX all alone.

Later, he emphasizes that they didn't even look at each others' code:

DDJ: Was there any concept of looking at each other's code or doing code reviews?

KT: [Shaking head] We were all pretty good coders.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#215

Post by randallsquared »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #154
randallsquared wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Have any actual data on that (to be clear, data that says that people didn't like / wanted to change the way that computer scrolling has worked for the last 25 years)?

I have no data. The first part of that bit ("... majority wanted ...") was intended to be somewhat hyperbolic, but I would expect that a survey would show that heavy smartphone and tablet users tend to keep the Lion default, rather than switch it back to the traditional scroll behavior. Haven't actually done the survey, though. :)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#216

Post by randallsquared »

acdha wrote: post #189
randallsquared wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

You are aware that the same “simple command“ is a checkbox in the OS X system preferences, right?

Yes, I am. I was just pointing out something about Linux that was easier than I'd expected, not dissing OS X. If you read the last coupla years of my history, you'll note some bitter rants from me about how 2010's Linux hadn't improved nearly as much as I'd hoped since I moved to OS X in 2003. So, I'm often pleasantly surprised these days. :)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#217

Post by peterwwillis »

acdha wrote: post #192
peterwwillis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"apt-get install " is about as good as software installation gets

Actually there's much better, but none that are freely available. And it's still distribution-specific which is retarded.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#218

Post by phkamp »

jballanc wrote: post #208
ori_b wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to drop the cathedral and bazaar analogy, because I don't feel like debating the exact meaning of the terms. It seems to me that quality is about having someone on the top who is willing to give direction and vision to a project, instead of having every person who scratches their own itch full influence. Contributors are great. But letting everyone pull in their own direction doesn't lead to something that…

The problem is that coherent vision and a prior design are NOT equivalent. Obviously, I cannot know what was going through the head of ESR when he wrote the original essay, but what I've always taken from it is that a priori design is inherently inflexible, prone to becoming disconnected from reality, and ultimately less inviting to creativity. If the suggestion of the article is that the only way to retain quality i…

Brooks spends some time discussing these issues in the book, and I'm pretty much aligned with him:

Nobody belives in "a priori design" and I somehow doubt that anybody did. Brooks points out that the original publication of the "waterfall model" was meant as "how not to..." and people got that wrong.

But cathedrals are not about a priori design, they are about style, elegance, economy of means and coherency of design.

But my point in the piece is that the lost generation doesn't even know what a cathedral is in the first place, having grown up in the bazaar.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#219

Post by tedunangst »

brlewis wrote: post #182
phkamp wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never read ESR's essay/book, did you ?

I read ESR's essay. He was protesting how hard GNU makes it for outside contributors such as himself. Somehow the essay got construed as open source vs. closed source, and ESR pivoted to align with the popular interpretation of his essay. I've never read the book (someone would have to give me a really good reason), but I assume it doesn't focus on GNU. You're calling a ot of people out on using Microsoft as a cathed…

In a world where software is designed by cathedrals, there is no need for autoconf. You read the POSIX spec and write software that conforms to it.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#220

Post by DanBC »

phkamp wrote: post #160
Munksgaard wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to what chrisaycock said, phks writings are typically very "lacking" and assumes a certain knowledge about whatever he has chosen to write about. He writes interesting stuff, a lot is implied and/or not very sufficiently explained.

Or maybe, just maybe I don't write for the lowest common denominator, but for people who can think for themselves.

I think Munksgaard is supporting you, and that there are some problems with different languages.
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