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A welll thought out piece rom someone who promotes open source software and is the guy behind 'software carpentry', an initiative to teach researchers [mosly sc

A welll thought out piece rom someone who promotes open source software and is the guy behind 'software carpentry', an initiative to teach researchers [mosly scientists] basic software skills. I like the way he pointso out problems with both the cathedral and bazaar models but identifies that "actually matters is the people who build them.". My favouite line: "One king, one law" can sometimes be a great force for good, but what you usually get is collectivized agriculture and UML.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
The bazaar seems to have permanent and crippling ADHD and seems mostly dedicated to reinventing wheels. (There are exceptions, but maybe not as many as we'd all like.) The cathedral is a centralised bureaucratic black hole. This is another example where O'Reilly's attempts at social engineering have gone horribly wrong. Neither model is ideal, and both are somewhat wrong. I'm surprised how little computer science is about project psychology, and how little effort has gone into defining the dynamics of successful and innovative developer teams. There are a few heuristics that seem to work reliably - use a small number of the smartest people you can find, get them to peer review the design before anyone starts coding, and continue peer review as they work - but almost nothing (at least not much I've been able to find) about how to make innovative magic happen reliably. Point is books like the C & B are story-telling designed to pander to a certain audience, not empirically tested science. More of the latter and less of the former might do some useful things.
- ethbro 12y ago
  >The bazaar seems to have permanent and crippling ADHD and seems mostly dedicated to reinventing wheels. ADHD at the strategic level, but hyper-focus at the tactical level. Because when you're a professional developer (as I'd imagine the majority of people writing non-core open source packages are) why doesn't "reimplementing {wheel} in {new language/framework/architecture}" sound more interesting than "bug fixes". Nobody likes fixing someone else's bugs.
- japhyr 12y ago
  What has O'Reilly attempted in regards to social engineering?
- craigyk 12y ago
  Nothing wrong with creating rounder wheels; especially for training. I was at a conference where a panel of scientists were discussing how they manage research in their labs, and how to promote better productivity from their students with a focus on high-throughput methods. At this point, a single scientist on the panel interrupted with "we shouldn't focus on training for these intellectually bankrupt approaches, I'm interested in training scientists who can think." When I was first learning to code I was completely overzealous with performance optimization and I implemented every single data structure and algorithm myself, from scratch. This included a lot of computer vision, and optimization and fitting code, and studying books like Numerical Algorithms, etc. While not efficient, I sure did learn a lot.
  - dalke 12y ago
    "a single scientist on the panel interrupted ..." The response from the other panelist wasn't going to be the correct one, which is "Duh! Not helpful!" Is that scientist making the claim based on evidence, or based on personal belief? If so, what is the evidence? Do we train everyone to think the same way? Do we train them to think about problems in specific areas? Do we train them to think about historical problems? Would improved knowledge of the literature help identify unexplored paths, and keep students from revisiting old, well-trodden paths, or should some old things be left mostly unvisited?
- theoh 12y ago
  "A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze and Guattari is a great example of success in the field of organisational metaphors, or an egregious bit of unscientific storytelling, depending on how you look at it. In particular their ideas of smooth and striated space map onto bazaar and cathedral to some degree.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

The bazaar seems to have permanent and crippling ADHD and seems mostly dedicated to reinventing wheels. (There are exceptions, but maybe not as many as we'd all like.) The cathedral is a centralised bureaucratic black hole. This is another example where O'Reilly's attempts at social engineering have gone horribly wrong. Neither model is ideal, and both are somewhat wrong. I'm surprised how little computer science is about project psychology, and how little effort has gone into defining the dynamics of successful and innovative developer teams. There are a few heuristics that seem to work reliably - use a small number of the smartest people you can find, get them to peer review the design before anyone starts coding, and continue peer review as they work - but almost nothing (at least not much I've been able to find) about how to make innovative magic happen reliably. Point is books like the C & B are story-telling designed to pander to a certain audience, not empirically tested science. More of the latter and less of the former might do some useful things.

ethbro 12y ago
>The bazaar seems to have permanent and crippling ADHD and seems mostly dedicated to reinventing wheels. ADHD at the strategic level, but hyper-focus at the tactical level. Because when you're a professional developer (as I'd imagine the majority of people writing non-core open source packages are) why doesn't "reimplementing {wheel} in {new language/framework/architecture}" sound more interesting than "bug fixes". Nobody likes fixing someone else's bugs.
japhyr 12y ago
What has O'Reilly attempted in regards to social engineering?
craigyk 12y ago
Nothing wrong with creating rounder wheels; especially for training. I was at a conference where a panel of scientists were discussing how they manage research in their labs, and how to promote better productivity from their students with a focus on high-throughput methods. At this point, a single scientist on the panel interrupted with "we shouldn't focus on training for these intellectually bankrupt approaches, I'm interested in training scientists who can think." When I was first learning to code I was completely overzealous with performance optimization and I implemented every single data structure and algorithm myself, from scratch. This included a lot of computer vision, and optimization and fitting code, and studying books like Numerical Algorithms, etc. While not efficient, I sure did learn a lot.
- dalke 12y ago
  "a single scientist on the panel interrupted ..." The response from the other panelist wasn't going to be the correct one, which is "Duh! Not helpful!" Is that scientist making the claim based on evidence, or based on personal belief? If so, what is the evidence? Do we train everyone to think the same way? Do we train them to think about problems in specific areas? Do we train them to think about historical problems? Would improved knowledge of the literature help identify unexplored paths, and keep students from revisiting old, well-trodden paths, or should some old things be left mostly unvisited?
theoh 12y ago
"A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze and Guattari is a great example of success in the field of organisational metaphors, or an egregious bit of unscientific storytelling, depending on how you look at it. In particular their ideas of smooth and striated space map onto bazaar and cathedral to some degree.