Re: Our Most Precious Resource: Programmer Time (was Re: long term goals)
According to Jason Gunthorpe:
> On Sun, 3 Dec 2000, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> > There are a lot of good programmers. But that resource -- *us* -- is
> > close to exhaustion. The Free Software and/or Open Source movements
> > are being spread very, very thin by user demands and our own
>
> Aye.. I think the `barrier to entry` is also rising, all the cheezy little
> apps seem to have been done to death and then some. It is rarer and rarer
> that you can sit down and write something worthwhile and be done in a
> month.
Good point. Sounds like something ESR probably covered in his
"Homesteading the Noosphere" essay.
> There also seems to be an increase in lower skilled people - this is
> important becauase you just can't expect stunning efficiency out of
> inexperiancied people.
Of course not. That's why I'm not discussing the inexperienced. I'm
discussing how to make the experienced more productive in less time.
> I strongly suspect that a novice programmer is less likely to make a huge
> mess of a project in C than in a more complex language like C++ or Perl.
Messy projects are bad. But labor-intensive, memory-leaking,
stack-overflowing programs are much, much worse.
> I don't expect to wake up tomrrow and find that people are moving
> away from C - GNOME/GTK seems to be the banner example of this kind
> of thinking :<
KDE may help.
--
Chip Salzenberg - a.k.a. - <chip@valinux.com>
"Give me immortality, or give me death!" // Firesign Theatre
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