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I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are, particularly open source ones. If anything, too much work goes into open source

by tikhonj 15y ago

I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are, particularly open source ones. If anything, too much work goes into open source development tools--certainly much more than in any other category! Just look at how much is accomplished--and how is easily--by various start-ups using open source technology. There are great web servers, web frameworks, libraries, programming languages, text editors and all sorts of other stuff (that I don't use much so can't comment on). Also, plenty of people contribute to (popular) open source libraries and frameworks. Even less popular projects get a good amount of contribution--I'm following a couple of emacs modes (a fork of JS-2 and Haskell-mode) as well as some tools (like DoctorJS) on GitHub and all of these get pull requests surprisingly often. I suspect the ratio of contributors to users is pretty high. In short, open source as a model works if your only goal is quality software. Making a framework open source is a good course of action and we should encourage it.

wavephorm 15y ago
I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are No. Development tools seriously suck. Show me an IDE that can debug multi-client websocket code. Good luck. Every open source IDE's like Eclipse are useless these days because they can no longer keep up with the new problems being introduced. Light Table is maybe the first genuinely new, commercial, development environment to be introduced. People are gushing over the possibilities. All of a sudden people might, for the first time in 15 years, be willing to pay real money to make their lives easier. The open source model is a socialist model that has failed to keep up with the pace of technological change, and encourages developers to not purchase development tools which slows innovation in development technologies. FOSS ultimately holds back innovation.
- prezjordan 15y ago
  You seem to ignore the fact that open-source allows more people to use a product. When more people use it, more activity happens - which leads to evolution. Not sure how you can ignore the open-source software that rules the software development world.
  - wavephorm 15y ago
    More people using a product does not lead to innovation. It leads to more people using the same free product and not realizing how much better their tools could be if they were willing to pay for them. Open source tools rule the world simply because they are free, and developers everywhere are unwilling to pay for better tools, which hold back innovation of better tools. Why would anyone build a substantially better development tool if nobody will buy it?
- eggsby 15y ago
  You speak of light table, but that specific project wouldn't have existed without clojure which uses the eclipse license; doesn't this make it a derivative of open source? Furthermore, ibdknox open sources the majority of his projects... How can you reconcile with this information? It seems to me that most of the interesting software coming out these days is a product of the open source movement, rather than an attempt to escape from it.
- cantankerous 15y ago
  Conflating FOSS to socialism is patently absurd (FOSS is very monetizable and comes in many different forms that you can incorporate into many different business models) and an attempt to co-opt a very negative "red baiting" sentiment in others.
stcredzero 15y ago
I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are, particularly open source ones I'm curious about your specific frame of reference. Which tools do you have in mind? Have you also used Visual Studio, C#, and Linq as a point of comparison? (I have not, but they are mentioned favorably in these comments.) A lot of people might cite Eclipse as a good development tool. The Java GUI library used to implement it was much lauded as well. However, it was not so much Open Source that drove its quality as the willingness of IBM to commoditize Java and Java development environments out from under Sun. GCC was a going concern, but a lot of its development was funded by commercial firms that wanted fixes or extensions. Chromium and Firefox have certainly benefitted from outside funding. From what I've seen, FOSS can often produce good back-end software but user-facing stuff is often lacking in a certain polish, unless there is commercial backing and paid professionals are contributors. I've also read that the majority of FOSS projects become stagnant. I think of them as startups but for a different system of compensation. That's not good or bad. That's just the reality of how these things work.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  Well, I think mostly about the tools I usually use: JavaScript, Haskell (GHC is really absurdly awesome), Emacs (which has really good support for certain languages including JavaScript and Haskell but emphatically not Java), TeX, GNU/Linux, Git and probably a bunch of other tools and libraries that don't spring to mind immediately. I have used Visual Studio (mostly for C++ but a tiny bit of C# for WPF stuff), but not too much. I've found myself significantly more productive with Emacs, but I've also now used Emacs quite a bit more. I also used a full version of Intellij in my summer job, but was thoroughly unimpressed. Now, I'll grant that the tools I've listed tend to have harsh learning curves. However, I posit that they are exceptionally effective in experienced hands. I think this is not a drawback: learning a tool is a constant expense where being more efficient is a benefit proportional to how much you use that tool. I would rather have tools that are harder to learn but more efficient than the opposite. Now, it is true that a tool that is easy to learn does not have to be less efficient and a tool that's harder to learn does not have to be more efficient, but I have found the two to be correlated in practice. While the user-facing FOSS projects may be less polished in general, I have found that this does not hold nearly as much for developer tools. The main problem with letting developers design UIs is that they assume that everybody thinks like them; this isn't an entirely unfair assumption when writing tools for fellow developers! As I have mentioned, while FOSS developer tool UIs may be harder to learn, I have found them superior overall. Emacs is a perfect example--it does not follow any conventions of other common software (it pre-dates all that other software, after all) but within itself it is by far the most consistent UI I have ever encountered. In fact, I think Emacs is a great picture of brilliant UX; the sole problem is that it lives in its own universe (and isn't as slick or shiny as some newer options). And of course, with the right lisp incantation, you can do magic. Finally, it is true that the majority of FOSS projects become stagnant. Then again, this is doubtless true of the majority of non-FOSS projects as well. Back in my Windows days, I would frequently encounter "shareware" that had fallen into disrepair. The main difference is that an abandoned FOSS project can easily be patched or even brought back to life (JS-2 mode is a perfect example of this); abandoned proprietary software is basically dead. Now, clearly, proprietary programs like Visual Studio supported by large companies will not die. But that is true of big open source projects as well: most of the ones I listed aren't disappearing any time soon. So stagnation is really constant across all software; the difference is that FOSS software is much more difficult to kill completely. Hopefully my aimless ramblings have cleared my views on the subject.

by tikhonj 15y ago

wavephorm 15y ago

I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are No. Development tools seriously suck. Show me an IDE that can debug multi-client websocket code. Good luck. Every open source IDE's like Eclipse are useless these days because they can no longer keep up with the new problems being introduced. Light Table is maybe the first genuinely new, commercial, development environment to be introduced. People are gushing over the possibilities. All of a sudden people might, for the first time in 15 years, be willing to pay real money to make their lives easier. The open source model is a socialist model that has failed to keep up with the pace of technological change, and encourages developers to not purchase development tools which slows innovation in development technologies. FOSS ultimately holds back innovation.

prezjordan 15y ago
You seem to ignore the fact that open-source allows more people to use a product. When more people use it, more activity happens - which leads to evolution. Not sure how you can ignore the open-source software that rules the software development world.
- wavephorm 15y ago
  More people using a product does not lead to innovation. It leads to more people using the same free product and not realizing how much better their tools could be if they were willing to pay for them. Open source tools rule the world simply because they are free, and developers everywhere are unwilling to pay for better tools, which hold back innovation of better tools. Why would anyone build a substantially better development tool if nobody will buy it?
eggsby 15y ago
You speak of light table, but that specific project wouldn't have existed without clojure which uses the eclipse license; doesn't this make it a derivative of open source? Furthermore, ibdknox open sources the majority of his projects... How can you reconcile with this information? It seems to me that most of the interesting software coming out these days is a product of the open source movement, rather than an attempt to escape from it.
cantankerous 15y ago
Conflating FOSS to socialism is patently absurd (FOSS is very monetizable and comes in many different forms that you can incorporate into many different business models) and an attempt to co-opt a very negative "red baiting" sentiment in others.

stcredzero 15y ago

I think that's demonstrably false given how good development tools actually are, particularly open source ones I'm curious about your specific frame of reference. Which tools do you have in mind? Have you also used Visual Studio, C#, and Linq as a point of comparison? (I have not, but they are mentioned favorably in these comments.) A lot of people might cite Eclipse as a good development tool. The Java GUI library used to implement it was much lauded as well. However, it was not so much Open Source that drove its quality as the willingness of IBM to commoditize Java and Java development environments out from under Sun. GCC was a going concern, but a lot of its development was funded by commercial firms that wanted fixes or extensions. Chromium and Firefox have certainly benefitted from outside funding. From what I've seen, FOSS can often produce good back-end software but user-facing stuff is often lacking in a certain polish, unless there is commercial backing and paid professionals are contributors. I've also read that the majority of FOSS projects become stagnant. I think of them as startups but for a different system of compensation. That's not good or bad. That's just the reality of how these things work.

tikhonj 15y ago
Well, I think mostly about the tools I usually use: JavaScript, Haskell (GHC is really absurdly awesome), Emacs (which has really good support for certain languages including JavaScript and Haskell but emphatically not Java), TeX, GNU/Linux, Git and probably a bunch of other tools and libraries that don't spring to mind immediately. I have used Visual Studio (mostly for C++ but a tiny bit of C# for WPF stuff), but not too much. I've found myself significantly more productive with Emacs, but I've also now used Emacs quite a bit more. I also used a full version of Intellij in my summer job, but was thoroughly unimpressed. Now, I'll grant that the tools I've listed tend to have harsh learning curves. However, I posit that they are exceptionally effective in experienced hands. I think this is not a drawback: learning a tool is a constant expense where being more efficient is a benefit proportional to how much you use that tool. I would rather have tools that are harder to learn but more efficient than the opposite. Now, it is true that a tool that is easy to learn does not have to be less efficient and a tool that's harder to learn does not have to be more efficient, but I have found the two to be correlated in practice. While the user-facing FOSS projects may be less polished in general, I have found that this does not hold nearly as much for developer tools. The main problem with letting developers design UIs is that they assume that everybody thinks like them; this isn't an entirely unfair assumption when writing tools for fellow developers! As I have mentioned, while FOSS developer tool UIs may be harder to learn, I have found them superior overall. Emacs is a perfect example--it does not follow any conventions of other common software (it pre-dates all that other software, after all) but within itself it is by far the most consistent UI I have ever encountered. In fact, I think Emacs is a great picture of brilliant UX; the sole problem is that it lives in its own universe (and isn't as slick or shiny as some newer options). And of course, with the right lisp incantation, you can do magic. Finally, it is true that the majority of FOSS projects become stagnant. Then again, this is doubtless true of the majority of non-FOSS projects as well. Back in my Windows days, I would frequently encounter "shareware" that had fallen into disrepair. The main difference is that an abandoned FOSS project can easily be patched or even brought back to life (JS-2 mode is a perfect example of this); abandoned proprietary software is basically dead. Now, clearly, proprietary programs like Visual Studio supported by large companies will not die. But that is true of big open source projects as well: most of the ones I listed aren't disappearing any time soon. So stagnation is really constant across all software; the difference is that FOSS software is much more difficult to kill completely. Hopefully my aimless ramblings have cleared my views on the subject.