On Wednesday 25 June 2003 12:25 pm, Brian Baquiran wrote: * From an old article by Philip Greenspun:
The article is indeed old. The mold has been shattered and invalidated by open source programmers, and here are some of them: * 6. a professional programmer teaches by documentation; writing is hard but * the best software documentation has always been written by programmers * who were willing to make an extra effort Sacha Chua puts it more succinctly: A professional programmer best teaches by the source. No matter how good your documentation is, there is no substitute for the source code. The source code is the reason why any proficient programmer can innovate on each others work. Documentation complements the source code. Source code can stand on its own, documentation alone cannot. This means that if you have source code and no documentation, you can still look at it and understand what it does. If you only have documentation and no source code, you'll waste much time reverse-engineering the whole thing. * 7. a professional programmer teaches face-to-face; we've not found a substitute * for face-to-face interaction so a software engineering professional should teach * fellow workers via code review, teach short overview lectures to large * audiences, and help teach multi-week courses Old school Philip indeed. He's never looked at how open source projects get developed. One of the quirks of free/open source programmers is that FEW of them ACTUALLY get to see each other, yet they collaborate on a very effective level. They leverage the power of e-mail, IRC, etc. to communicate across the world. No matter what medium or device they use, as long as they can communicate, then that'll do fine. Note that free/open source programmers have become more efficient in sharing source code. They have mechanisms to impose discipline and meritocracy among them. They have mechanisms to guide their work so that all efforts complement each other while enabling them to innovate. They share code, they delegate the work. All these years, they have proven they can do more quality work inspite of the lack of face-to-face interaction. Sharing ideas is the key. Articles such as "Cathedral and the Bazaar", or "Homesteading the Noosphere" by Eric S. Raymond explain very well how the process works. There's an online version and worth reading. optimus -- RAM wasn't built in a day. -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
