On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 9:14 AM, Ximin Luo <infini...@freenetproject.org> wrote: > > You're applying a generalisation inappropriately here. Linux did not win > because they spent time writing code instead of documentation. They did > both. And even now they're taking ideas from Hurd and microkernel theory. >
I'm not claiming that Linux won just because they spent more time writing code than documentation, however Linux definitely had a "code first, ask questions later" philosophy, whereas Hurd was a much more "theoretical" exercise. You might want to read or re-read this <http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html> debate between Torvalds and Tanenbaum > The Agile manifesto is a load of crap. I've seen more teams and more > projects destroy themselves by deferring to the Agile manifesto to excuse > bad engineering, than destroy themselves by overengineering and > overdocumentation. > Apparently you've seen a lot of poorly run projects. I agree that agile has become a dogma of sorts, and like any dogma it can be abused, however the underlying principles are solid, which is why nobody seriously defends a waterfall software development methodology any more. You may not like agile, and you might have seen mediocre engineers use it to defend their mediocrity, but the general idea of "shut-up and code" won the battle of ideas a long time ago. Also Bob was talking about the current Hurd project. It's a stretch to say > that Hurd lost "because" of overdocumentation. There were technical > problems with microkernel architecture that were not solved for a long > time, less people in FOSS understood it, blah blah blah. Some microkernels > like L4 are becoming more succesful today, and in the long run they have > inherent advantages over monolithic kernels, such as being easier to > formally verify. > Yes, even 23 years ago they were making the same arguments, "microkernels are better in the long run", the problem is that in the long run we're all dead. That's not an exaggeration, there are many software engineers that died in the decades they waited for microkernels to become useful. > > You may also be unaware that in the ideal case, well-written code is > > self-documenting, making external documentation unnecessary. This is one > > of the tenants of the "clean code" methodology. > > This is for *other developers*, not for external reviewers Of course well written self-documenting code is for external reviewers. If someone is going to review something, much better that they review working code than some document that purports (but might not) describe the working code. > or other projects that might to interoperate with different components of > your product. It's irrelevant to what's being discussed. Do you see a long line of software developers just waiting to reimplement Freenet, if only they had comprehensive documentation? You're dreaming. We barely have the resources to maintain and advance one implementation of Freenet. Ian. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
