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Optimizing Development For Fun

Posted by Zonk on from the haskell-has-never-been-or-will-ever-be-fun dept.

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."

8 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. This is all well and good... by g_dunn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But, as a programmer, if the project I'm working on isn't something I want to do, and enjoy doing, why am I doing it? Even in the workplace, all of my projects are fun to me - That's why I decided to work there! And as open source projects are generally done as an aside, why volunteer to work their if the project doesn't interest you anyway? If you're not enjoying what you're doing, why are you doing it?

    1. Re:This is all well and good... by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "If you're not enjoying what you're doing, why are you doing it?"

      Food on the table, mainly.

      In any event, I think questions like this are more helpful for management than they are for programmers or anybody else with a similar profession. The article uses the word 'fun', but in practice, I think 'importance' is a more interesting term. (Maybe they're not all that dissimilar?) Constantly changing directions in order to meet arbitrary deadlines or "chasing money" is a real morale killer. Working with well laid plan knowing that you're boring work is going to pay off into an interesting product, that's a lot more interesting. It's important.

      Eh I think I'm mainly just stating the obvious here. When I hear stories of companies like EA demanding tons of unpaid overtime to meet an arbitrary deadline, it seems to me that even the 'fun' parts of asset building turn into a curse real fast. It's not fun to try to shortcut your way to the finish line with the concern that one of those shortcuts will come back and nip your hinder.

      --
      "Derp de derp."
  2. Why shouldn't it be fun? by punkdigerati · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  3. Re:while by autrijus · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Verily. However, I think a key parts of of the fun is a solid expectation of making a difference in the world, while the current result being immediately useful (for learning and/or production).

    A project generally regarded as pointless will likely have a difficult time finding contributors that sees this kind of fun in it.

  4. It's not frivolous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What a weird article description. Getting people to hack on frivolous projects generally isn't a problem. Getting them to hack on tough projects can be. Okay, maybe this is a test implementation in a funky language, but this isn't a frivolous project according to the Perl folks; Damian Conway described the work as "both amazing and amazingly useful: as a way of
    exploring the deeper design and implementation issues" here:
    http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.language /19263

    Worst of all, the word frivolous distracts from the point of the article, which is all about techniques you can use to help making hacking on any project fun. It's not about only hacking on projects that are instrinsically fun, as 'frivolous toys' tend to be.

  5. Re:Mod story +5 Insightful by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If a Wikipedia article gets munged temporarily by someone who's stupid, uninformed, or malicious, it's no big deal, and it will probably get fixed soon. But when it's a piece of software, the consequences are potentially a lot more serious, and there's no guarantee that the damage will be detected or fixed any time soon.

    Why will the damage to wikipedia get fixed soon? Because anybody can fix it. Why will the damage to the software not be fixed soon? Because only a couple of people have the ability to fix it. The idea is to give far more people the ability to fix that problem (a number which is proportional to the number of people who are likely to cause the problem, so the problems shouldn't get out of hand).

    Why is the software problem more serious? Because softare is fragile. Is that inherent to software, or is it just the condition of the software development tools and processes we use today? I believe it is the latter. I believe software development tools and processes could be a lot more robust and forgiving of simple mistakes. And if projects started really opening up contributions, made it as easy as editing a Wiki, then they would be forced to become more robust. This is a good thing, not something to be avoided.

    I'm not sure the conclusions from The Mythical Man Month apply directly here. The main conclusion is that adding developers to a project makes it take longer. Open source software isn't on a strict schedule, and it doesn't have central management with clearly defined lists of requirements. New contributors aren't assigned to speed up existing work, they add their own features and improve the software in their own way.

    Most successful open-source projects also have exactly one author. Massive parallelization works best for something like Wikipedia that's both big and inherently parallelizable. Most software isn't like that.

    I'm thinking about the big projects here. KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, Debian, etc. But why is it that developing software isn't inherently parallelizable? To the extent that is actually true, once again I blame the tools. We need better software development tools to make software development more parallelizable. I don't think there's any inherent reason why "Joe's Yet Another MP3 Database" on SourceForge shouldn't be able to use this type of develoment methodology, given the right tools.

    --
    main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
  6. Re:Mod story +5 Insightful by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Why is the software problem more serious? Because softare is fragile.
    No, it's more serious because, e.g.:
    • People depend on software to get their work done.
    • Broken software can mess up your data.
    • Malicious software can do bad things, like give your credit card number to Russian gangsters.
    Vandalizing a Wikipedia article has none of these serious consequences.

    Why will the damage to wikipedia get fixed soon? Because anybody can fix it. Why will the damage to the software not be fixed soon? Because only a couple of people have the ability to fix it.
    If you take the total number of people in the world who are interested in and capable of doing OSS programming, and divide by the number of OSS projects, the result is a number close to 1. This is why most OSS projects have a single author. Imagining that "only a couple of people" have the privileges to fix a bug is actually optimistic -- the most likely case is that only one person is interested.

    --
    Find free books.
  7. Vice Versa? by Maljin+Jolt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While writing perl in haskell *is* fun, writing haskell in perl would be a horrific nightmare torture. Perhaps all code language disputations/wars should be solved by duel of this kind.

    --
    There you are, staring at me again.