Bill Lear wrote: > How about a primer on what exactly constitutes computer programming? > I was laying awake for a few hours last night after a day of coffee > overdose and was thinking about writing up just what it is that us > geeks behind the scenes of Linux, etc., are doing... An interesting paper is "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond (http://www.ssc.com/linux/Eric/cathedral.html). It is a mixture of the technical and the philosophical but its main theme is that complex software can be developed successfully through a "bazaar" model (like Linux). A lead developer releases test versions frequently onto the Internet and the community of users debugs it and comes up with new ideas as well as fixes. The result is communally written software. Interestingly, Netscape have adopted the model, at least in part. The contrast is with the classical commercial "cathedral" model where the emphasis is on control of the process. There are questions as to how scalable that is. Raymond's paper is well written and thought-provoking but doesn't cover many questions such as the integrity of the software (including trojan horses and the like) and its expected life time. His discussion of "selfish agents" (those participating in the development process without reward) is shallow, seemingly trying to shoehorn them into a market model. Bill Bill Rosenberg, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
