[Cialug] Learning the 'C' language

[Nathan C. Smith]

I'm already involved on the political/project end, but it's hard to be taken
seriously if you don't commit code.  


-----Original Message-----
From: Morris Dovey [mailto:mrdovey at iedu.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 9:53 AM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] Learning the 'C' language


Josh More wrote:

| I would argue that the one thing that the open source world doesn't 
| need is more C/C++ coders. If you want to contribute to a project in 
| meaningful ways, I would
| suggest:
|
| * Morph the code into a comment style that works with NaturalDocs, so 
| that other programmers can have an API reference.
| * Adjust the end user documentation so that it is useful
| * Start political manuvering to combine similar projects and share 
| resources
| * Provide project management to help the devs agree on priorities and 
| meet deadlines.

Hmm. Ok, I'll argue with you. I think you're partially right - in that
people who _only_ know how to write compilable code (in any language) are
minimally useful. The same is true of those people who can't grasp that C
and C++ are very different languages with only cosmetic similarities and
fundamentally different paradigms (a detail that even/especially Dennis and
Bjarne have agreed on in both news:comp.lang.c and news:comp.lang.c++).

I'll argue further that more damage has been done to projects by clueless
designers and clueless documentation producers than by anyone else involved.
The former are productivity wasters of the worst kind and the latter spoil
the usefulness of even the highest quality work for anyone subsequently
involved.

Part of the cluefulness required is a knowledge of "how things work" in
order to be able to even begin to understand "what it takes". To attempt to
design software without that knowledge - or to document it - leads directly
to "faking it" (and indirectly to such phenomena as "Halt, retry, fail?"
messages).

It seems to me counter-productive to discourage anyone (especially
volunteers) seeking to increase their knowledge, experience, and involvement
- or to shunt them away from where their interests lie.

But then, I've never had much success convincing geeks to "Start political
manuvering" - YMMV.

Morris Dovey

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