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<DIV> You bring up some very fine points. And I fully agree with most of them.
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<DIV>My main concern is that there are a lot of similar projects out there because
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<DIV>the original project was poorly designed and/or commented. I would like to
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<DIV>see people put more time into making projects more open. 'Open' in this
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<DIV>case means 'accepting of contributions from others'. I am very concerned
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<DIV>about the "You must know _____" meritocracy that I see in the open source
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<DIV>communities. I worry that if we keep up this semi-hostile attitude that the
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<DIV>open source movement will start losing momentum.
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<DIV>With regards to your point of discouraging it, I wholeheartedly agree.
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<DIV>I was not trying to discourage the desire to learn C. I just think that
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<DIV>Nate has skills that he could use that would impact projects much more
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<DIV>strongly than just adding another programmer.
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<DIV>To my mind, it's like a CEO learning about cows so that he can go flip
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<DIV>burgers at McDonald's. (Exaggerated for effect.)
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<DIV><br><br><br>-- <br>-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP<br> morej@alliancetechnologies.net<br> 515-245-7701<br><br>>>>mrdovey@iedu.com 10/12/05 9:52 am >>><br>Josh More wrote:<br><br>| I would argue that the one thing that the open source world doesn't<br>| need is more C/C++ coders.<br>| If you want to contribute to a project in meaningful ways, I would<br>| suggest:<br>|<br>| * Morph the code into a comment style that works with NaturalDocs,<br>| so that other programmers can have an API reference.<br>| * Adjust the end user documentation so that it is useful<br>| * Start political manuvering to combine similar projects and share<br>| resources<br>| * Provide project management to help the devs agree on priorities<br>| and meet deadlines.<br><br>Hmm. Ok, I'll argue with you. I think you're partially right - in that<br>people who _only_ know how to write compilable code (in any language)<br>are minimally useful. The same is true of those people who can't grasp<br>that C and C++ are very different languages with only cosmetic<br>similarities and fundamentally different paradigms (a detail that<br>even/especially Dennis and Bjarne have agreed on in both<br>news:comp.lang.c and news:comp.lang.c++).<br><br>I'll argue further that more damage has been done to projects by<br>clueless designers and clueless documentation producers than by anyone<br>else involved. The former are productivity wasters of the worst kind and<br>the latter spoil the usefulness of even the highest quality work for<br>anyone subsequently involved.<br><br>Part of the cluefulness required is a knowledge of "how things work" in<br>order to be able to even begin to understand "what it takes". To attempt<br>to design software without that knowledge - or to document it - leads<br>directly to "faking it" (and indirectly to such phenomena as "Halt,<br>retry, fail?" messages).<br><br>It seems to me counter-productive to discourage anyone (especially<br>volunteers) seeking to increase their knowledge, experience, and<br>involvement - or to shunt them away from where their interests lie.<br><br>But then, I've never had much success convincing geeks to "Start<br>political manuvering" - YMMV.<br><br>Morris Dovey<br><br><br>Cialug mailing list<br>Cialug@cialug.org<br>http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug<br> </DIV>
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