Optimizing Development For Fun

chromatic writes "Geoff Broadwell has written an analysis of optimizing an open source project for fun, specifically the Pugs project. Broadwell argues that making development fun and easy leads to higher quality code and a faster velocity of development, even when implementing a frivolous project (a toy Perl 6 interpreter) in an uncommon language (Haskell). The Pugs leader, Autrijus Tang, will speak about both Pugs and Haskell at EuroOSCON."

Comments

Re:This is all well and good...

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything I've ever done that 'needed' to be done, I enjoyed doing. If you're not enjoying what you do, why are you doing it? Chances are, someone else is capable of doing it, and would enjoy their time doing so.

Everything isn't about you.

Re:Faster velocity?

[hunterx11]

Perhaps they wish to specify a vector, lest they should develop backwards. Unfortunately, even for a play on words this is nonetheless a possibility.

All we need now is ...

[Douglas Simmons]

this to be implemented into apt-get so we the debian community are still superior to those pompous fun-compiling gentoo users.

Re:Why shouldn't it be fun?

[jonadab]

> I'm sure many more people would have a cleaner house if cleaning their house was fun.

There actually are people who think cleaning stuff up is a real blast. Most of us are convinced they're certifiably loony, but they're so useful to have around that very seldom does anyone have one of them committed to a mental institution. The usual response is more like, "Hey, that's great, glad you're having such a good time. Maybe I'll buy you a new mop out of my next paycheck. No, don't thank me, I just love it when you have a good time, really."

There are not very *many* of these people around, though. Perhaps one or two per thousand, not nearly enough to keep all the world's households clean. Which is probably for the best -- I think it would be kinda scary if there were too many of them.