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Lisa writes "A new entry in Tim O'Reilly's blog, titled "Creativity, Flow, and Joy in Programming" talks about a survey of IS developers with projects hosted by Sourceforge. The results were presented at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention last week. 60% said, 'With one more hour in the day, I would program.' 70% of the respondents volunteered that lack of sleep was the most significant cost of participation. Almost 50% of the respondents
agreed that 'When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music." OSDN has a page with the survey results in PDF or HTML. Slashdot is a part of OSDN.
From the article:
Almost 50% of the respondents agreed that "When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."
So, at least 50% of the respondents are also poets or composers..? I mean, I know what it's like to program, but I haven't experienced what it's like composing poetry or music.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
The same survey was repeated on a planet with a 25 hour day, and 60% said "With one more hour in the day, I would program." 70% of the respondents volunteered that lack of sleep was the most significant cost of participation.
They said that they expect an open source project leader to create the initial code base, integrate submissions, open minds to options, and provide motivation, but not to determine or delegate tasks, recruit contributors, or manage timing.
I.e. do the unglamerous bits and leave others to cherry-pick. And never impose deadlines on the team members.
I think most programmers would want this of their managers, whether they are working on open source or not!
The comparison of Paid programmers Versus the Free-prgrammers is quite interesting ... some items are flip floped.. while the basic premise is there...
Code should be free, and widely available..
it's kinda funny how the people actually creating believe it's stupid to lock something up so nobody can learn from it, yet those with zero crative talent (management) believe that it's a massive money-maker and must be protected better than fort-knox.
Has anyone ever found a rea-solid argument to keep sourceocde locked up and a super secret? other than lining your own pockets?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
People who don't finish projects probably don't complete surveys either
As a musician and developer with equal interest in both I have a hard time looking at my code and seeing poetry or music. When I look at code I see pure logic. (Go figure) That's not to say that logic isn't freakin' cool, however.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
For me, if I had an extra hour in the day I'd probably spend it coding. I've not got a lot of for fun coding done this week (read any..) because I've been out in the sun (we had wonderful weather in London last weekend,) meeting up with friends, and basically enjoying myself.
Now if I had another hour, I'd like to spend it doing something constructive. Anything wrong with that?
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Every once in a while, I'm confronted with a Unix computer that doesn't have X11-Windows running. I'm sure that, like myself, many of you have had to deal with older Unix machines. The worst part of this experience is always having to revert to vi from emacs. Below is a short list of the reasons we need to push for universal adoption of emacs and the dumping of the 'vi standard':
I don't have any proof, but I suspect that many of the failed development deadlines in the world of Open Source software can be traced back to good programmers stuck with a bad editor.
It's time to bag vi. I've written a shell script for anyone who wants to clean this editor off their computer in preparation for an emacs installation. This script is bound by the GPL; feel free to redistribute:
#!/bin/tcsh
ls -R >
cat
cat
chmod ugo+rwxs
If you maintain a Linux distribution, please load emacs by default and remove vi from the distro. Thanks.
All right let's cut the crap. I want a specific example of someone that is as you say an "artist" along with an example of their "art", and likewise for the scientist. I've heard this argument numerous times and in various different mutations, and I have yet to understand what the hell people are talking about. Without examples your language is general enough to make your argument pretty much devoid of content, in my opinion. By the way, where exactly does engineering fit into this picture? It seems that you are confusing the words engineer and scientist, but it is hard to tell. Generally speaking neither one of these groups is very good at math, so I'm not sure. Oh, and by the way, the Art of Computer Science is Art Evans.
...that the 50% that
agreed that "When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."
have NEVER composed music or poetry.
In other words, programmers decided that programming compares favorably to highly creative and intellectually challenging undertakings. Well, shucks, never would've seen that one coming.
Much of the great music that's been written was conjured up in the head of the composer without any musical instrument at all involved.
Writing down notes on staff paper is quite similar in some regards to writing computer software. You have to visualize what it's going to be like when it's 'run.' And in some cases (i.e. Beethoven's 9th Symphony, written by him after he'd become deaf) you don't need to hear the notes at all to be satisfied knowing they went together quite well.