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Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

blog.lacebark.io

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Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#31

Post by CognitiveLens »

chx wrote: post #10

> They are also not on github, which makes collaboration that much harder. This is now vim-emacs level zealotry. There are workflows which gasp do not mesh well with github. github issues/PRs have almost no metadata and absolutely none that the issue submitter can set.

zealotry? It's one comment in an article dealing almost entirely with other issues.

Github has become the de-facto place to put code that you want others to work with, and it is a platform built to surface such projects and make them accessible in a consistent way.

It's not the only such tool, but it is really familiar to a lot of people, and that makes collaboration slightly easier for those who are familiar with it.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#32

Post by raverbashing »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #23
brudgers wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robust open-source CAD software would clearly fill a niche. The problem however, is not so much CAD as the schemas for the data that at gets attached to the models...IGES has been around for many decades, but what one engineer needs for FEA is not what the machinist needs for making the die or the Architect for making pretty pictures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file open source data formats are more important than programs initially, the above is for 3d models. "— namely, the position of each vertex, the UV position of each texture coordinate vertex, vertex normals, and the faces that make each polygon defined as a list of vertices, and texture vertices. " I'm sure there's one for the edge based models too. I can see an UrStandar…

The texture thing just solved the 3D drawing problem, not the FEA problem, or the machinist/CNC problem

You don't care about vertexes when you're spinning things in a lathe

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#33

Post by rsl7 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #5
dfc wrote: post #3

I am confused about the title. What is "Area"?

It looks like a riff off of a common Onion news article headline pattern. Looking at their homepage now, I see these: "Area Man Experimented With Sex Back In College" "Lunch Barely Misses Area Man's Vital Organs" "Area Facebook User Incredibly Stupid"

the "area man" on the onion is a satire of local news, the kind of thing you'd see in a small township newspaper

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#34

Post by raverbashing »

CognitiveLens wrote: post #31
chx wrote: post #10

> They are also not on github, which makes collaboration that much harder. This is now vim-emacs level zealotry. There are workflows which gasp do not mesh well with github. github issues/PRs have almost no metadata and absolutely none that the issue submitter can set.

zealotry? It's one comment in an article dealing almost entirely with other issues. Github has become the de-facto place to put code that you want others to work with, and it is a platform built to surface such projects and make them accessible in a consistent way. It's not the only such tool, but it is really familiar to a lot of people, and that makes collaboration slightly easier for those who are familiar with it…

"Github has become the de-facto place to put code"

Maybe in some districts of SF and SV, but apart from that, NO

I love Github and I think that it is way better than most of "industry standarts" but amazingly, some people still use self hosted solutions, because they need it.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#35

Post by lmz »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #23
brudgers wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robust open-source CAD software would clearly fill a niche. The problem however, is not so much CAD as the schemas for the data that at gets attached to the models...IGES has been around for many decades, but what one engineer needs for FEA is not what the machinist needs for making the die or the Architect for making pretty pictures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file open source data formats are more important than programs initially, the above is for 3d models. "— namely, the position of each vertex, the UV position of each texture coordinate vertex, vertex normals, and the faces that make each polygon defined as a list of vertices, and texture vertices. " I'm sure there's one for the edge based models too. I can see an UrStandar…

Collada? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#36

Post by CognitiveLens »

raverbashing wrote: post #34
CognitiveLens wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zealotry? It's one comment in an article dealing almost entirely with other issues. Github has become the de-facto place to put code that you want others to work with, and it is a platform built to surface such projects and make them accessible in a consistent way. It's not the only such tool, but it is really familiar to a lot of people, and that makes collaboration slightly easier for those who are familiar with it…

"Github has become the de-facto place to put code" Maybe in some districts of SF and SV, but apart from that, NO I love Github and I think that it is way better than most of "industry standarts" but amazingly, some people still use self hosted solutions, because they need it.

full quote: "Github has become the de-facto place to put code that you want others to work with".

Maybe I should clarify: "others" == "people who don't know or directly work with you"

Self-hosted solutions do not make collaboration simpler (in an OSS context), which is the reasonable, non-zealous claim made by the article.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#37

Post by walshemj »

rsl7 wrote: post #33
vinceguidry wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like a riff off of a common Onion news article headline pattern. Looking at their homepage now, I see these: "Area Man Experimented With Sex Back In College" "Lunch Barely Misses Area Man's Vital Organs" "Area Facebook User Incredibly Stupid"

the "area man" on the onion is a satire of local news, the kind of thing you'd see in a small township newspaper

Apparently taken from real life allegedly one vary parochial Scottish news paper reported the sinking of the titanic as "North-east man lost at sea"

And they didn't mean north east Scotland it was an even smaller area.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#38

Post by kanzure »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #18

Open Source geometric kernel? It is called "Open Cascade": http://www.opencascade.org/ It represent decades of hard work from dozens of programmers.License is LGPL. Freecad is a very promising tool that uses the power of Opencascade only a little(Opencascade supports things that are way more complex than what freecad does). Everything in Freecad is a script in python.

Unfortunately, OpenCASCADE is an unmaintainable pile of code. There's https://github.com/tpaviot/oce but does anyone really want to maintain 3 million lines of poorly written source code? Here's what you will have to deal with if you dive in: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/cad/opencascade :(

So far the absolutely cleanest implementation I have seen is http://verbnurbs.com/ which is amazing. Seriously, go over here https://github.com/pboyer/verb and compare. This is way, way cleaner than OpenNURBS like uh https://github.com/kanzure/brlcad/tree/master/src/other/open... here. And it has tests distributed with the source code, so hey you can actually attempt to maintain it if you are into that.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#39

Post by ef4 »

chx wrote: post #10

> They are also not on github, which makes collaboration that much harder. This is now vim-emacs level zealotry. There are workflows which gasp do not mesh well with github. github issues/PRs have almost no metadata and absolutely none that the issue submitter can set.

> There are workflows which gasp do not mesh well with github.

If we're discussing open source collaboration, it is hugely beneficial to NOT have your own unique workflow and instead adopt one that a large community of people are already using.

In the time it takes to read your special "how to submit a patch" document, I could have already been done if you were using a de-facto standard workflow like Github's. This has a material impact on how much contribution you can expect to get from others.

This is yet another case of Worse is Better. Ubiquity trumps perfection.

I have heard it argued that making contributions harder to submit is somehow a good idea, because it keeps lower quality contributors out. This is very much mistaken, and even someone as cantankerous as Linus is on the record saying that encouraging more patches, even annoyingly naive ones, is in the long-term interest of the project.

Re: Area programmer laments designers don’t use the same tools he does

#40

Post by philwelch »

gumby wrote: post #12
ams6110 wrote: post #8

It lends itself to a workflow where sometimes, a user checks out a file, and forgets to unlock it. Or goes on vacation. Then you have to forcibly check out the file your coworker locked to get work done. And when he has to merge his changes with yours again, it’s a gigantic hassle. This exactly describes web development on the Microsoft stack using Visual Source Safe. I don't know if that product exists anymore or st…

Ah, ams6110, I feel your pain, but you have not encountered true agony until you have been subjected to... Perforce (aka p4). It feels like the p4 designers WANTED software development to be harder. Perhaps they recruit developers exclusively from the pool of former TSA agents.

Perforce was fine compared to ClearCase.
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