I was reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond and it got me thinking that in my years of schooling I have been trained to be a cathedral builder. Every thing we developed in school was something we worked on alone, or in small groups. We would even have competitions to see who could write better AI, when if we all worked together we could have easily written something that was not only better but something that would have taken a fraction of the time to write and debug.
The thing that stuck out to me the most in the reading was Linus' Law "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." This quote is very significant because of how true it is. Often times we look at code trying to debug it and miss bugs because we are reading what we expect to be there and not whats actually written there. Also, with how flexible coding is, having a lot of people staring at the code will produce many different ways of fixing the bug, one way would definitely be the easiest.
I also agreed with the part about how the open source software is so good because people do it because they genuinely like what they are doing. All the programs I write, if I am not into writing them then I'll do the bare minimum but if I am excited about a certain project I will not only do what is required, I will put even more effort into it to make it that much better.
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3 comments:
Great to see you back in action.
Dave
It is so true that we are training to become a cathedral builder and not a single project in school so far is focus on team work. Maybe perhaps this concept will filter out all the freeloaders in the process so in the end all that is left is competent programmers.
I like your take on the article. I think we need a little bit of both worlds - it seems like there are benefits to both methods. However, to say that one method is better than the other is debatable. :)
-Fred
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