13 Aug
2004
13 Aug
'04
8:49 p.m.
John Check wrote:
On Thursday 12 August 2004 03:34 pm, Erik Steffl
wrote:
not really, you will always have nothing, then something incomplete
sort of usable and only after that there's something usable (if you're
lucky:-)
developer could opt to not release unfinished stuff but then how
would he get requirements?
...
John Check wrote:
...
Yup. There's a definite progression. I'm not unfamiliar with development
cycles, as far as does it _have_ to be that way, it's a debatable point. One act gigging with this stuff is worth a dozen
coders when it comes to
legitimizing the platform. There's so much potential with what's here
today that it blows my mind, but if it's "by geeks, for geeks" it really
limits were
not that long ago it wasn't even that. The sound/audio/music software
in linux is improving rapidly. obviously, you get the by geeks for geeks
stuff first because it cannot be any other way - it takes time to make
the program stable enough to be usable by general public. There's is a tendency though, for free software
developers to put some things
off because "We'll make it right for 1.0". Which in itself is good, but we
have a quality obsession (which is also good) whereby a 1.0 release really
means something, unlike commercial software.
The upshot of this is as the code matures, decisions that were made early on
become hairier and hairier to address. Ironically, this can lead to massive
redesign and rewrites which pretty much wipes out most of the accumulated
documentation in terms of accuracy.
I don't remember a project (hobby or commercial) that would not go
through major design changes. This is true for major project (with all
the docs that osi 9000 (or whatever it is for software) requires) all
the way to small (but non-trivial) scripts.
It is a problem but I don't think there is a way out, it's kinda like
there's no perpetuum mobile, you always loose some energy (=docs always
lag, requirements change, bugs are found etc.)
OTOH I guess now is a good time to focus on usability since the tools
are on the verge of actually working (for general public, i.e. non
programmers, non sysadmins)
I just find it somewhat not entirely appropriate to make it sound as
if developers were ignoring users/documentation/user-interface etc.
That's the whole mindset that I see expressed fairly often, don't mean
to accuse you of accusing developers, actually your email was quite
reasonable (so I am, to some extent, using your email as a vehicle to
rant a bit:-)
erik