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Eric S. Raymond Unveils New List Of 'Hacker Archetypes' (ibiblio.org)
An anonymous reader writes:
Open source guru Eric S. Raymond has announced public brainstorming on a "gallery of hacker archetypes to help motivate newbies" by defining several different psychologies commonly found among programmers. He's unveiled an initial list developed with a friend, along with some interesting commentary. (Algorithmicists often have poor social skills and "a tendency to fail by excessive cleverness. Never let them manage anyone!")
Raymond cautions that "No hacker is only one of these" -- though apparently most of the hackers he knows appear to be two of them, "an indication that we are, even if imperfectly, zeroing in on real traits." But the blog post ends by asking "What archetypes, if any, are we missing?"
It'll be interesting to see if Slashdot readers if they recognize themselves in any of the archetypes. But the blog post also answers the inevitable question. What archetype is Eric S. Raymond?
"Mostly Architect with a side of Algorithmicist and a touch of Jack-of-All-Trades."
Raymond cautions that "No hacker is only one of these" -- though apparently most of the hackers he knows appear to be two of them, "an indication that we are, even if imperfectly, zeroing in on real traits." But the blog post ends by asking "What archetypes, if any, are we missing?"
It'll be interesting to see if Slashdot readers if they recognize themselves in any of the archetypes. But the blog post also answers the inevitable question. What archetype is Eric S. Raymond?
"Mostly Architect with a side of Algorithmicist and a touch of Jack-of-All-Trades."
Well TIL.
Imagine getting to be Internet famous today for writing a few extensions to a POP3 suite. Life was once pretty easy.
What archetypes, if any, are we missing?
The type for whom the journey (or development process) is all. They love creating something: code, hardware, paintings. And for them, it is the production that matters, not the the final result. You might call them "perfectionists" because they will never finish anything (until they get bored and just drop it, to start travelling on a different journey) and will constantly be adding new parts, features or functions.
Their favourite saying is "just another couple of weeks" when asked by their team-leader, project supervisor, manager when their assignment will be ready. But 2 weeks later, the answer is still the same. Although they are enthusiastic, their failure mode is that they never produce an end product and their office, lab or home is full of half-completed projects.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Don't underestimate the role that esr had on the fledgling open source movement.
While his software accomplishments may be looked down upon by some, it was his role as a free thinker and a spiritual leader of the open source movement that was his greatest accomplishment.
Movements need leaders. These leaders act as a sort of "glue", tying together heterogeneous individuals and factions into one cohesive homogeneous movement. That's what esr did. His writings gave an entire community a common purpose, a common philosophy, and a common pattern of thought.
His role is much like that of Jimi Hendrix to the nascent hippy movement of the 1960s.
esr's vision set us down the path of success. He rallied many individuals and helped coordinate our efforts into creating the vibrant open source ecosystem we know today.
I used to go to Linux user group meetings where we would read an excerpt from "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and then we would collectively meditate upon its reading. His writings inspired millions of open source programmers, and without his guidance we wouldn't have been able to create the software and the community that we have created.
It's no mistake that he's considered part of the Open Source Trinity, along with rms and Linus. He's one of the pillars upon which the entire open source movement has been built. If you remove the contributions of rms, the open source movement never would have started. If you remove the contributions of Linus, the open source movement would have never reached the heights it reached today. If you remove the contributions of esr, the open source movement would have fractured and broken into nothingness.
esr is one of our main guiding lights. His vision and deep understanding of what it means to be open source has been invaluable. The open source movement owes its existence to esr, and that's why we pay tribute to what he has so graciously given us.
This is the kind of post-hoc hagiography that fuels Ayn Rand's objectivism crap mountain.
Out of these three, it's only hard to imagine a different, yet equally grand path if RMS had never occurred. His foundational dog work on binutils invited many others to host parties they could not have otherwise managed to throw.
Due to RMS as a unique personality, we got a highly political license sooner than we would have by another probable path. This was both a strength and a liability, whose relative magnitudes are almost impossible to judge in retrospect.
Without Linus, FreeBSD either would have become far more participatory, or some variant with a far greater embrace and tolerance of messiness would have forked within two years. And since this wouldn't have embraced GPL at the system level, Gnu HURD might even have been finished, with perhaps a necessary course correction or two under mounting pressure from a large install base.
Saying that open source wouldn't exist as it now does without ESR is pretty close to saying that the internet boom of the late nineties would not have happened without George Gilder. ("George who?" all the children ask. Exactly my point.)
Certainly charismatic figures come along when the moment is ripe to crystallize the zeitgeist, but history does not record that these people have ever been in short supply (something that would become immediately obvious if that stupid scheme from Atlas Shrugged had ever been tried for real in the real world.) Generally, you can never have more than a few of these types at any given time, because the human psychology of prophets and prophecy accrues special powers to the lone voice. A solitary howling wolf is divine revelation, a million howling wolves is just a statistical noise (see again the howlingly ludicrous legacy of one Ayn Rand).