Jonathan Revusky wrote: > George Dinwiddie wrote: > > There are many companies using Struts for far > > more important things than simple websites. I believe that many of > > these companies would be unwilling to trust Struts for > > these uses if > > the project were to greatly open up the commit privileges. > > You really believe that, huh? I don't know. I am very skeptical about > this because I just find it hard to believe that... well... certain > kinds of pointy-head managers who insist on using Struts or > some other > well known thing have very clear ideas about the processes by which > these software products were actually developed. I see a lot > of it is a > herd mentality, essentially. "Everybody else is using this > thing so it's > the 'safe choice'." (i.e. "Nobody can fire my ass for recommending > Oracle, say, because everybody else is using Oracle, but if I > recommend > that we use Acme RDBMS, that nobody has heard of, my ass is on the > line....") > > OTOH, maybe what you say is true. I can only speculate about > the basis > on which other people make decisions.
I presume that you've never worked in a corporate environment. Proceeding on that assumption, let me explain a little to you. Scott Adams has made his fortune displaying the cynical view of managers that you describe. Indeed, from the point of view of the technical staff or others with limited access to those managers, it often looks like decisions are being made very arbitrarily. In some cases, they actually are. Incompetent managers are probably as common as incompetent developers. In reality, most managers do have a brain and use it. Most managers are not merely trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves so they can draw a salary for doing no work. Believe it or not, most managers take their jobs seriously and make the best decisions they can given the knowledge they have and the circumstances in which they make them. By "knowledge they have" I don't mean technical ignorance. Sure, some are quite ignorant technically and most do not have the detailed technical knowledge of a developer, but they also have knowledge of non-technical issues of which most developers are rather ignorant. > Anyway, supposing for the sake of argument that what you believe is > true, then this leads to another basic question. > > Would such a belief be well founded? (I mean the belief that it would > somehow become riskier to use Struts, say, if the barriers to > becoming a > committer were drastically lowered.) Now we're leaving empiricism for speculation. > This is actually the question that interests me. If people > believe this > but it's not true, then.... well... you know, should one > condition one's > behavior based on other people's misguided beliefs? Or > actually, in this > case, the misguided beliefs you are speculating that certain other > people may hold... You've extrapolated several suppositions, here. Who says their beliefs are misguided? I presume from these statements that you're rather young. In my youth, I tended to believe that those who didn't agree with my beliefs were misguided. And I was not shy of telling them so. But even supposing that I am right and they are wrong (and I no longer believe that these are boolean values), I am unlikely to convince them by announcing that they're all wrong. They will naturally think, "On the one hand, I have this kid without the experience to understand the issues which I'm balancing telling me that I'm wrong. On the other hand, my view of the world and the way it works has done pretty well for me so far." Do you doubt everything you've learned when someone walks up and says you're wrong? I thought not. Is your lack of success in convincing someone that they're wrong their problem or yours? Do you want to do something about that lack of success? Or do you like that status quo? If you like futile arguments, then you seem to be doing a fine job on your own. But if you want to argue more effectively, then I can suggest the AYE Conference (http://www.ayeconference.com/conference.html). And if you can't find the time or money to attend, there's still lots of good information in the blogs and articles of the people who put on that conference--more than you could assimilate in a lifetime. > Well, what I see is that there are people here (not just me) > seriously > questioning whether the so-called "Apache Way" is really all it's > cracked up to be. In response, you have people saying: "This > is how the > Apache Way works" or simply pointing to some document > somewhere in the > same way that a religious fundamentalist would quote scripture. Do you want to contribute to Struts and feel excluded? Or are you morally indignant based on higher principles? I can't figure this out. As for the technology, and the rules of running the project, in both cases I'm glad that the wide world provides more than one choice. I'm glad that not all projects are run according to the same monoculture of organization, so that people can try out new ideas, just as I'm glad that the technological choices are varied. What a poor world this would be if there were no choices. - George Dinwiddie http://www.idiacomputing.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
