I stumbled across an interesting story about a recent adventure you had in India. (Sorry I lost the link - it had something to do with a fudster who didn't like logging onto his home machine.) Based on your experiences in India and other parts of the non-West, what do you think needs to be stressed, advocacy-wise to make Linux more acceptable outside America and Europe ?
During TBWP hype, there was some fall out regarding fan sites which turned out to really be run by the studio.
Will mindshare agree to never use this type of trick in its campaigns ? Will mindshare agree to always tell the readers of it's sites that 1) what they are reading is paid advertising, and 2) who is paying for the advertising ?
Personally, I like to know when people are doing something because they are getting paid for, and when they are really doing something because they believe in what they're saying.
My guess is that Y2K fiasco probably has a lot to do with older programmer's problems.
Suppose you're some high level suit who's just had to shell out a lot of money to some consultants to fix some Y2K problems. You've learned it was so expensive because no one in your shop really knew what the code was doing anymore. The consultant shows you some reports that have been being printed out for the past 2 years that got sent from Office A to Office B and Office B just threw the reports in the trash.
Now, what are you going to think of the programmers who built this system, and who have been on your staff maintaining it for the past XX years ? If it was me, I would probably think these guys had no clue what they were doing, and didn't really deserve the money they were getting. I would be looking for new blood, and if it came from younger folks who I can pay with table scraps, so much the better.
For my coding generation, I see the same thing occuring with 4GLs such as PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, and other propriatry development environments. These will be maintained by folks who invested a lot of time and effort learning the systems, and then never bothered learning another thing for the rest of their careers. The apps will have to be replaced once they too become an unbearable burden. A lot of consultants who still know how to develop in these system will get rich.
However, employeers will start looking at people of my coding generation as the evil 4GLs, with their evil propriatary development systems, and their ultra fat clients. I doubt it will make much of a difference that I will have not done a lot work with 4GLs, just as I doubt it makes much of a difference whether older programmers today has ever coded with COBOL.
I think the lesson here is to not only keep your skill set clean, buit to also do your best to make sure the systems you worked on don't come back to haunt you later in your career. This means making sure your code is maintainable, and that it will be able to be moved along to new technologies as they become available. Don't code in closed, propriatary systems, document what you do code, make sure you capture your requirements.
(In the long run, I think tools that will help in the maintenance and transformation of large code bases will be just as important to the Open Source movement as end user GUIs.)
Slashdot Mirror
I stumbled across an interesting story about a
recent adventure you had in India. (Sorry I lost the link - it had something to do with a fudster who didn't like logging onto his home machine.)
Based on your experiences in India and other parts of the non-West, what do you think needs to be stressed, advocacy-wise to make Linux more acceptable outside America and Europe ?
During TBWP hype, there was some fall out regarding fan sites which turned out to really be run by the studio.
Will mindshare agree to never use this type of trick in its campaigns ? Will mindshare agree to always tell the readers of it's sites that 1) what they are reading is paid advertising, and 2) who is paying for the advertising ?
Personally, I like to know when people are doing something because they are getting paid for, and when they are really doing something because they believe in what they're saying.
My guess is that Y2K fiasco probably has a lot to do with older programmer's problems.
Suppose you're some high level suit who's just had to shell out a lot of money to some consultants to fix some Y2K problems. You've learned it was so expensive because no one in your shop really knew what the code was doing anymore. The consultant shows you some reports that have been being printed out for the past 2 years that got sent from Office A to Office B and Office B just threw the reports in the trash.
Now, what are you going to think of the programmers who built this system, and who have been on your staff maintaining it for the past XX years ? If it was me, I would probably think these guys had no clue what they were doing, and didn't really deserve the money they were getting. I would be looking for new blood, and if it came from younger folks who I can pay with table scraps, so much the better.
For my coding generation, I see the same thing occuring with 4GLs such as PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, and other propriatry development environments. These will be maintained by folks who invested a lot of time and effort learning the systems, and then never bothered learning another thing for the rest of their careers. The apps will have to be replaced once they too become an unbearable burden. A lot of consultants who still know how to develop in these system will get rich.
However, employeers will start looking at people of my coding generation as the evil 4GLs, with their evil propriatary development systems, and their ultra fat clients. I doubt it will make much of a difference that I will have not done a lot work with 4GLs, just as I doubt it makes much of a difference whether older programmers today has ever coded with COBOL.
I think the lesson here is to not only keep your skill set clean, buit to also do your best to make sure the systems you worked on don't come back to haunt you later in your career. This means making sure your code is maintainable, and that it will be able to be moved along to new technologies as they become available. Don't code in closed, propriatary systems, document what you do code, make sure you capture your requirements.
(In the long run, I think tools that will help in the maintenance and transformation of large code bases will be just as important to the Open Source movement as end user GUIs.)
- Jude
If you're a Haskell fan, check out this Mindstorms page .