[Cialug] Learning the 'C' language

[Morris Dovey]

Josh More wrote:

| You bring up some very fine points.  And I fully agree with most of
| them.
|
| My main concern is that there are a lot of similar projects out
| there because the original project was poorly designed and/or
| commented.  I would like to see people put more time into making
| projects more open.  'Open' in this case means 'accepting of
| contributions from others'.  I am very concerned about the "You
| must know _____" meritocracy that I see in the open source
| communities.  I worry that if we keep up this semi-hostile attitude
| that the open source movement will start losing momentum.

You're absolutely correct about the junkpile of poorly designed and
poorly commented/documented projects - and the problem isn't unique to
the open source community. I actually made a career of traveling around
the country cleaning up other peoples' hardware/software/documentation
messes.

The open source movement won't lose much momentum until people begin
taking it for granted - and certainly not so long as there are competent
and inventive people who see OS as the vehicle by which they can make
the world a better place. We can do a lot to prolong its life by finding
some way for those people to be spotlighted for doing just that. (my 2¢)

Hostility usually indicates that there's more than one way of seeing
something and that there's more than one person who has strong feelings.
The usual right answer is to call in a mutually respected referee to
make a call.

| With regards to your point of discouraging it, I wholeheartedly
| agree.
| I was not trying to discourage the desire to learn C.  I just think
| that Nate has skills that he could use that would impact projects
| much more strongly than just adding another programmer.

Aha! Everyone else knows more about Nate and "the project" than do I -
my bad for not making more effort to get to the meetings and get to know
people better. Still - I would guess that he would derive substantial
benefit from "knowing how things work" and having some personal
experience with "knowing what it takes". There's also the aspect of
project leadership where it pays to know when someone is spouting BS and
when they're not...

| To my mind, it's like a CEO learning about cows so that he can go
| flip burgers at McDonald's.  (Exaggerated for effect.)

Well, if it's the McDonald's CEO (or a store owner), then it just might
be a good mooove. :-)

Morris Dovey
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