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Hacker Survey
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.
After interacting with many programmers I fined that there are generally two different categories of programmers:
Artists - They may not be great at math, they may not be great at science, but when it comes to programming they have an intuitive nature about it - often making unique or "insightful" code. not necessarily the easiest to read... This would be the 50% that said that programming was like writing poetry.
Scientists - These are the sort that rely moreso on science and math. They tend to be slightly less intuitive in the code, but it is sometimes made up for by readability and correctness.
Of course, most programmers are a combination of the two, with one aspect slightly more dominant than the other.
I've found that I tend more towards the artist...
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
Sure Company A's product is nice. But ours can do everything theirs can, and did we mention that it is free. It is our way of saying thank you to our clients (and slapping the competition for infringing on part of our market).
Speaking as someone who has spent significant amounts of time both composing music and writing programs, I can say that they aren't quite the same. Writing music can be much more carthartic (meanings 2) then programming. Composing music, at least the way I did it with a synth so you can hear it right away, can be emotionally freeing in a way that programming can't be.
Flip side, programming can be more exciting, in that it's easier to do something that nobody's done before or better then anybody's done before, with the right tools. Frankly, all the music YOU'LL ever write has basically been written; after hundreds of years of musical development, it's damned hard to find anything new to call your own. (It's not impossible, but very, very, very hard.)
The similarities are otherwise quite significant. With both, you do better and more work when you're "in the zone". There are some days where you just can't get anything done (interestingly, the overlap is not 100%; some days I could write music and not program, and vice versa). There's a lot of freedom, constrained by logic in both. (Whatever you may think, no music anyone will ever want to listen to is completely free of internal logic and consistency, and you violate those rules that we all know, even if we can't articulate them, at your own peril, just as with programming style.)
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Dude, they are artists! They start with a blank vi session, much like and empty canvas or a blank LP. They might have a vague idea of what their end result will be, but the journey is always new and the finished product is seldom what was envisioned prior.
The creative juices flow, while the artist mixes his paint, the musician tunes his instruments, and the coder cracks his knuckles and sips Mountain Dew. Soon, the process begins, and art is created. A beautiful entity replaces the spaces of nothingness that previously existed, and the artist is sated and complete.
Now, at the end of the session, the coder releases his art under the GPL, allowing the world to see, touch, and modify the beauty that he created, while thge musician and artist rely on the concept of intellectual property to prevent the world from truly appreciating their work.
most of the stuff I program is for personal reasons, i get bored and i'll write my own code, i know what they mean... writing code at work is different, i don't have any respect for that code, they tell me what to do and i do it, make code like this, but add these features, debug this, you broke that, ect. with my own code i can excercise my creativty, and i truly enjoy it
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
I think the results were analyzed very well. I particularly like the way they took the results and separated respondents into categories by motivations and contribution status: "Professionals" (paid for contribution, and do it for the work functionality), "Hobbyists" (completely non work-functionality), "Learning and Intellect" (motivation is intellectual stimulation), and "Community Believers" (believe that code should be open, and feel obligated to use).
Another interesting result for me as an undergraduate was that while sleep is the biggest thing lost by contributing to SourceForge, not many respondents felt the same about academic performance--leading me to believe that even though so much work is put in as to lose sleep over it, it may actually benefit college grades--which is what I've been told all along. Extracurriculars don't necessarily hurt your academics, in fact they can enhance it by giving you something else to focus on and enjoy. All in all a good survey.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
I have started two projects on sourceforge. One was on behalf of my former employer and we released the source code of the whole system under the Jabber PL. The project is still there, but neither I nor my employer is still maintaining it. You could add it to the "Project Cementery" of sourceforge (if they had one).
... well they all are way too happy with the new items at home, you know.
The second one was just registered a week ago. I have not yet released any files on sourceforge but have done so on my web site. Actually I opened the project just to have a mailing-list.
I spend almost two hours a day in this project, with almost five hours a day on weekends and on vacation. I have even asked for vacations at work just to get more time on the project. It's an open source project, but, even if a would like to have contributors I still have none.
So why do I do it? well thanks to it i just bought my new TV, freezer, laundry machine, DVD and PC. I give my project away for free, but charge for courses, documentation and solutions based on the system. As for today I have only had local customers, but I only hit the web last week.
As for the wife and kids
So they support me, I spend some time on my laptop and we all get new toys. Thanks to the LGPL (which is the license of my project and some tools I use within it).
Maybe this is kind of offtopic, but wanted to share it.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
This survey was very interesting, and I'd like to applaud the authors for taking the time to do it. However, I have some sort of bizarre genetic defect that causes me to get cranky whenever someone uses the phrase "Generation X", so I can't help but foam a bit about slide 21 on v0.73 of the slides on the OSDN site.
The slide is titled "Open Source is a Generation X phenomenon". Don't draw too many conclusions from this data - although most Free/Open Source programmers may be 21-38 years old now, I'm sure plenty of those larval hackers who are presently younger will join in the fun once they've got some more coding experience under their belts.
I don't think the whole hacking phenomenon will die out in 60 years. So, although the graph shows a peak, what I think we're witnessing is the beginning of a phenomenon that will continue indefinitely (or at least until debuggers are made illegal).
Oh, and I hate this whole "Generation foo" marketing thing.
- Tim
Has anyone ever found a rea-solid argument to keep sourceocde locked up and a super secret? other than lining your own pockets?
That enough right there, but it's what can be done with the money that's more important. You can, for starters, pay your programmers. They need to eat just as much as you. You can further development and get more releases out, I call it *better software*. The only reason everyone doesn't release their code is because no one would pay for it, and other people would steal their innovation. And no one seems to want to pay for open source, how much have you paid on open source lately?
I spent 18 months at an Open Source company, and never spent a single hour during company time in 18 months working on anything Open Source, including my own Open Source projects. I was certainly "expected" to put in 10+ hour days on the weekends though, without any additional compensation "for the good of the company".
Many Open Source developers are unemployed right now and still looking for work (259 days and counting for myself), and still contributing 100% of their time to their projects, while the "industry" at large continues to fire and lay off more and more qualified developers in the interest of "quarterly revenues". Trust me, nobody is getting more than half of their income from any company for working on projects that are given away gratis as the above slides lead you to believe.
I also reject the assertion that Sourceforge is leading the way in this regard. Sourceforge has been drifting for quite some time, and thousands of developers are leaving Sourceforge for want of better services every week. You don't see that on the surveys though, do you?
If you consider a line of code to be a cord.
For a cord to sound correct in a musical composition there are a few rules that should be applied.
Each cord can only be interpreted in one way (when written in standard notation)
but the collection of cords that make up a piece of music can have different meanings to different people.
A software programme is the same, although each line of code can only perform one task the user and writer of the code can use/produce an application with the same creative style as a music composer.
n.b. This is a very abstract comment, but I hope you get hte jist!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
... even though it is not a novel finding, is "98% male". This is more skewed than CS graduate school, for pete's sake. Do women never have a need to write code (or tweak/fix someone else's open source code) in their spare time? Or are they just less likely to release it for others to use? (or less likely to answer surveys about it afterwards, maybe? :)
Why?
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"