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I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity. That being said, Bzr is slow, it was always slow from day 1 -- and slowness is part of th

I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity. That being said, Bzr is slow, it was always slow from day 1 -- and slowness is part of the UI experience.

auvrw 13y ago
> I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity. this. so much. but "social and signaling effects" and "mindshare war" instead. sigh. what /is/ true, though, is the quote from the linked article: "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection." anyway, in an attempt to return from the hopelessly abstract and say something cogent about hip technologies and the article at hand, umm... i wonder how bzr runs on pypi?
rlpb 13y ago
Popularity means developers, which means bugfixes and more features in the future which projects may want to use. Switching DVCS has a cost to a project. Thus software popularity is important. This may be unfortunate, but this is how it is. DVCSs are by no means complete today, and cross-pollination of features continues. An unpopular project that has fewer developers working on it will fall behind. A project that doesn't want to keep switching DVCS has a reasonable interest in the DVCS project's future, since future features will come "for free".
octo_t 13y ago
part of something's merits is its popularity.
acdha 13y ago
> I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity. This is “your favorite band sucks” for software. For professional tools, popularity is usually directly tied to merits: notice how frequently people say they started with bzr/hg/darcs/etc. and switched to Git because it was faster/safer/better supported/added features they liked? Most of the competitors seemed to think they'd solved one big problem well enough that people would put up with the “minor” warts but in practice those are the things which you notice on a daily basis. Git was the third or fourth DVCS I tried and even fairly early on it was obvious that considerably more care was going into making basic day to day work easier and safer.
cwyers 13y ago
But popularity is one of the merits a software package can possess. Popularity offers: * A wider availability of resources -- tutorials, books, documentation of any kind, a community around the software that can offer help and support to new users, related tools and add-ons. * Evidence of the potential for longevity in the software -- the more popular it is, the more likely it is to continue to receive new features and bugfixes. * Portability of the knowledge of the workings of the software -- for users, this means that investing time and energy into learning the software now is a better investment, because that learning has a higher likelihood of being useful down the road. For people running projects, it means a larger pool of people who already have knowledge useful to contributing to your project. Your statement basically translates to, "I wish people would use software based on hypotheticals, rather than an evaluation of what it's like to actually use that software."
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity. That being said, Bzr is slow, it was always slow from day 1 -- and slowness is part of the UI experience.

auvrw 13y ago

> I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity. this. so much. but "social and signaling effects" and "mindshare war" instead. sigh. what /is/ true, though, is the quote from the linked article: "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection." anyway, in an attempt to return from the hopelessly abstract and say something cogent about hip technologies and the article at hand, umm... i wonder how bzr runs on pypi?

rlpb 13y ago

Popularity means developers, which means bugfixes and more features in the future which projects may want to use. Switching DVCS has a cost to a project. Thus software popularity is important. This may be unfortunate, but this is how it is. DVCSs are by no means complete today, and cross-pollination of features continues. An unpopular project that has fewer developers working on it will fall behind. A project that doesn't want to keep switching DVCS has a reasonable interest in the DVCS project's future, since future features will come "for free".

octo_t 13y ago

part of something's merits is its popularity.

acdha 13y ago

> I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity. This is “your favorite band sucks” for software. For professional tools, popularity is usually directly tied to merits: notice how frequently people say they started with bzr/hg/darcs/etc. and switched to Git because it was faster/safer/better supported/added features they liked? Most of the competitors seemed to think they'd solved one big problem well enough that people would put up with the “minor” warts but in practice those are the things which you notice on a daily basis. Git was the third or fourth DVCS I tried and even fairly early on it was obvious that considerably more care was going into making basic day to day work easier and safer.

cwyers 13y ago

But popularity is one of the merits a software package can possess. Popularity offers: * A wider availability of resources -- tutorials, books, documentation of any kind, a community around the software that can offer help and support to new users, related tools and add-ons. * Evidence of the potential for longevity in the software -- the more popular it is, the more likely it is to continue to receive new features and bugfixes. * Portability of the knowledge of the workings of the software -- for users, this means that investing time and energy into learning the software now is a better investment, because that learning has a higher likelihood of being useful down the road. For people running projects, it means a larger pool of people who already have knowledge useful to contributing to your project. Your statement basically translates to, "I wish people would use software based on hypotheticals, rather than an evaluation of what it's like to actually use that software."

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]