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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#271

Post by rsync »

pmjordan wrote: post #128
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…

I can't speak for the gp, but I certainly would still be on Snow Leopard if development for the current version of iOS was still supported on it. I'm now seriously considering switching back to Linux as a desktop OS as I hardly do any iOS work anymore. (I've rather fallen out of love with that platform too as it's pretty clear that the only objective is selling me a new iPad+iPhone every year as this year's iOS alway…

Not to fork this discussion further, but it bears repeating how much things changed after SL.

In fact, it actually reminds me a lot of the change from FreeBSD 4.x to 5.x ... things worked, people were happy ... and then boom.

That was when all of my desktops and laptops stopped running FreeBSD and I "switched" to the mac. I am fairly certain that once running SL stops being practical, I will switch again.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#272

Post by crag »

pmjordan wrote: post #128
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…

I can't speak for the gp, but I certainly would still be on Snow Leopard if development for the current version of iOS was still supported on it. I'm now seriously considering switching back to Linux as a desktop OS as I hardly do any iOS work anymore. (I've rather fallen out of love with that platform too as it's pretty clear that the only objective is selling me a new iPad+iPhone every year as this year's iOS alway…

"I suspect the objective for Lion was "make OSX look kind of like iOS and get rid of all of that GPLv3 software" and that's basically what was achieved. I guess bug-free software isn't good business, Microsoft were printing money for decades."

You can say that again. Frankly, after using Mac for 10 years, this is my last one.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#273

Post by dllthomas »

btrask wrote: post #205
jballanc wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Apple would certainly like you to believe that the image of iOS sprang, fully-formed, from the mind of Steve Jobs like some sort of medieval cathedral, the reality is anything but. In fact, much of Apple's success is due to the extent to which it functions like a confederation of very well funded startups. Cupertino is very much a bazaar, wherein a shopper with very refined tastes (Jobs, for example) can pick a…

Can I, the customer, pick and choose the finest wares? If not, it's not a bazaar.

The original essay is about how you build a cathedral versus how you build a bazaar, not what you use them for.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#274

Post by crag »

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…

I don't put the blame all on MS. Lets face it, MS' biggest customer is corporate. And they never EVER want to see change. They expect Word to be able to open files dating back to ancient times (like Works and Word Perfect files). So MS left the old libraries in.

I do think that was a mistake. But MS didn't (doesn't) have the luxury that Apple did (and still does). MS can't just shut 30 years of compatibility off and expect to keep their corporate customers happy.

Oh and just for the record (since this thread seems to be grouped by age, I was born in 1963. I remember when MS was cool and "us" nerds were running from CA and IBM.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#275

Post by gruseom »

_ea1k wrote: post #134
phkamp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sounds a bit "No True Scotsman" to me. Most commercial projects that I've seen eventually grapple with the same sorts of issues that you mention. When they've faced diverse deployment environments, the results have often been worse than autoconfigure, from what I've seen. I guess that's because they aren't cathedrals, since the businesses behind them were focusing on market-demands instead of whatever it is that…

Half of this thread is unfortunate terminological noise, but phk did specify what he means by "cathedral" – software governed by a coherent design vision – and Windows and Office are not only not that, they are the poster children for not that.

The words "cathedral" vs. "bazaar" have obviously gotten too vague for people to meaningfully argue about. But "coherent design vision" has a much clearer meaning, and an enormously important one.

I think the pendulum is bound to swing back from incoherent, hypercomplex software, because at some point the reductio that we've got today simply won't be able to adapt. Who knows what will trigger that, or when. But intelligent people will always care about simplicity, beauty, efficiency, and the other qualities that come from good design. And among the ignorant programmers there are more than a few whose eyes light up when they are finally exposed to good design, and want to learn to work that way. I'm an example. So there's no point of no return here.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#276

Post by ucee054 »

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 you are missing a couple of things.

In this comment I will equate "Rug Market" with "Ready, Fire, Aim" and "Cathedral" with "4 Year Plan".

Firstly, the "Rug Market" beats the "Cathedral" when you haven't formulated the problem properly, and so you have bad specs.

Secondly, the "Rug Market" beats the "Cathedral" when bad software is more profitable than good software. Google for "Worse Is Better" and "The Innovator's Dilemma".

Sad but true.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#277

Post by hollerith »

caf wrote: post #41
yungchin wrote: post #6

"Later the configure scripts became more ambitious, and as an almost predictable application of the Peter Principle, rather than standardize Unix to eliminate the need for them, somebody wrote a program, autoconf, to write the configure scripts." I'm not sure I understand how the Peter Principle applies here? Autoconf seems a rational solution in the economic sense: to standardise Unix, you need to have lots of influ…

Right, libtool is the same - the people that wrote it weren't in a position to demand that all the UNIX-likes out there standardise their ld flags, so they routed around the problem instead.

>the people that wrote it weren't in a position to demand that all the UNIX-likes out there standardise their ld flags

Agree, but once Linux became the dominant Unix-like, the major Linux distros like Debian and Redhat were probably in a position to replace uses of libtool in upstreams with a distro-wide standard for ld flags.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#278

Post by dllthomas »

typicalrunt wrote: post #102

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 tha…

> I feel the author needs to skim some books on evolution to see that there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach.

This is broken thinking.

You encountered,

"Process X has attribute A, and this is bad."

and you respond with,

"No, because Process Y also has attribute A."

This is only valid if we are either 1) guaranteed that there is nothing bad about process Y, or 2) considering processes X and Y as alternative options whose merits we are comparing.

Dispensing quickly with 2 - we are considering "Cathedral-mode development" vs. "Bazaar-mode development", not "Evolution" vs. "Bazaar-mode development", so this is not applicable.

Without further support, option 1 strikes me as confusion of is-ought. It is the case that evolution works this way, so any design process ought to work this way. There is, however, plenty "wrong with" evolution as an approach to producing designs for a given purpose. It is horribly inefficient compared to design, suffers from greater path dependence, doesn't keep notes about systems that may have worked that went extinct for unrelated reasons, etc. The attribute A that you are comparing is in fact one of the things "wrong with" evolution and "wrong with" Bazaar-mode development.

(Note, of course, that a problem with evolution in terms of producing optimal designs for our goals is not the same thing as a problem with evolution as an explanation of the world around us.)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#279

Post by npsimons »

artagnon wrote: post #239

I doubt the dichotomy is between the cathedral and the bazaar. All software projects have a list of gatekeepers or maintainers, who decide which changes should go in and which ones shouldn't. Some of them have a long list of people with commit access (like Subversion), while others have a handful of maintainers (like Linux). Some of them have grand roadmaps and bug trackers (like Firefox), while others have no agenda…

having a curator decide APIs and standards (OS X) certainly wins over an mashup of billions of packages (Debian).

That's your opinion, and you're entitled to it, but it certainly doesn't make it true. To me, Debian has always been the most elegant of operating systems, with a lot of thought put into how things are laid out and making sure that literally thousands and thousands of programs play very nicely together, not to mention compile and run properly on a multitude of architectures. And while I'm sure you can drag up some anecdotes about how Debian didn't detect some guy's wireless chipset, I can find complaints of things in OSX (right in the replies to this article!) that I've never had a problem with in Debian. Not to mention I don't like being told what I can and cannot do with my hardware.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#280

Post by npsimons »

flatline3 wrote: post #232
jballanc wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a priori design adapts, then it was never more than a coherent vision to begin with. The notion of a priori design is "we're going to do A, B, and C, and don't even think of changing the plan until those are done". As ESR talks about in his original essay, the "Cathedrals" were mostly developed in chunks. What was different about the Linux "Bazaar" was the way everyone could see and give input to the development a…

That's a false dichotomy -- a straw-man -- that's you're using to discredit the idea of planning ahead. Compare FreeBSD kernel design versus Linux. kqueue vs. dnotify/inotify/??? Mach-descended VM vs. a string of linux-vms BSD scheduler, ULE scheduler vs. how many different schedulers? Linux churns through ill-conceived solutions to problems until they find one acceptable enough. FreeBSD grinds on one until it defini…

FreeBSD grinds on one until it definitively works.

And what happens if it never works?

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