3 ms·
>A big problem with his thesis is that I see just as much ugly crap in proprietary codebases One of the reasons I suggested that folks take a look at previous
by jasode 9y ago
>A big problem with his thesis is that I see just as much ugly crap in proprietary codebases
One of the reasons I suggested that folks take a look at previous threads[1] is that phkamp clarifies his definitions of "cathedral != closed source / proprietary / commercial" and "bazaar != open source".
It's not obvious in the acmqueue essay but phkamp wants "cathedral" to be synonymous with "coherent architectural design". As a result, his example of having a bunch of open-source hackers add duplicate dependencies such as a TIFF library when the final build of Firefox doesn't even read tiff files is not "cathedral" and therefore not "quality".
The acmqueue article is not written very clearly because he uses metaphors "cathedral / bazaar" which makes people associate "cathedral" with entities like Microsoft which he didn't intend and not associate "cathedral" with pre-1980s commercial UNIX which he did intend. Obviously, he intentionally reused "cathedral/bazaar" because it was a refutation of Eric S Raymond's metaphors but nevertheless, recycling the same analogy sent multiple people down a road of imprecise arguments. Indeed, one of the comments in the 5-year old thread is an ex-Apple employee (jballanc) categorizing iOS development as "bazaar" but phkamp classifies it "cathedral". Talk about torturing metaphors until people talk right past each other!
[1] no need to read all ~300 comments, just Ctrl+f search for "phkamp": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188
- antod 9y agoI was under the impression the cathedral was eg describing GNU projects and the bazaar was describing eg the Linux kernel. ie it was about comparing different styles of running free/open source projects.
- jasode 9y ago>I was under the impression the cathedral was eg describing GNU projects and the bazaar was describing eg the Linux kernel. Yes, that was Eric S Raymond's[1] particular examples. However, phkamp extended it with phkamp's particular examples (Bell Labs UNIX (cathedral), Apple iOS (bazaar), Firefox (bazaar), Microsoft (neither bazaar nor cathedral?), etc). I should emphasize that it doesn't matter whether phkamp's classifications are "correct". (Indeed, the previous thread showed many disagreed with his taxonomy and 2 ex-Apple programmers contradict each other on iOS.) Whatever idiosyncratic definition phkamp wants to use for "cathedral/bazaar", the point is readers have to be aware of it to understand his acmqueue essay. (As I said previously, the freestanding article does not make his thesis clear so it lead to subsequent discussions that misunderstood what he wrote.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#.22The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#....
- vidarh 9y agoI don't think that really helps the argument. A lot of these decisions are explicitly made a part of a "coherent architectural design" - accounting for the economics of sorting out duplication vs. building a product is part of a design process. It may not be the quality he wants, but architecture is not about maximizing quality, but maximizing quality within a budget.