Rolling Your Own
I forget how I happened upon
this salon article about software evolution,
but I thought it was pretty cool
to see some quotes from my brother in it.
At the same time, however, Landauer wonders if the explanation for
similar growth trajectories across different systems isn't
"sociological". In other words, do programmers, by nature, prefer
to add new code rather than substitute or repair existing code?
The
Web Archetypes weblog
(Tangent about PyCS)
had a
pointer to this
Zen Development article in
SD Magazine...
What makes it hard for us to see solutions that already exist?
Speaking from bitter experience, I know that I find it uniquely
satisfying to craft clever coding solutions to problems...
The fact that so much money can (could?) be made in
programming blinds some people to the original motivation
that got many of us old-timers into programming in the first place:
that it was so much fun to get these machines
to do tricks for us.
(Tangent about the UCLA Computer Club.)
Some additional reasons why people write their
own code: overoptimistic complexity estimates ("gcc is
so unnecessarily complex that whatever I
come up with has got to be simpler"), and
reputation boosting ("look what
I built").
Loose ends:
PyCS: various weblogs have pointed to myelin,
the Radio Community Server clone that's written in Python.
Web Archetypes is one of the weblogs hosted there.
UCLA Computer Club: very briefly, it was fun in the 1970's, but some
time in the early 1980's, CS gradually became more like
"Programmers Vocational Training" and new
people entered the field for the money rather than for a love of
the activity. For a while, it seemed ironic to me that it was somewhere around that
time that the Computer Club actually died.
10:21:26 AM
Random radio Weblog