On Sunday, February 28, 2010, Brian Gilman <[email protected]> wrote: > That having been said, I think the project is an interesting one, but I'm > not sure it's really ready for tons of publicity yet.
Think of a software project as like Plato's model of the soul as a charioteer with two horses, one immortal and one mortal, only without the goal of reaching heaven. The mortal horse is the imperatives of the real world: developers, money, users, releases and so on, while the immortal horse represents elegance, simplicity, performance, design perfection. A successful project usually manages to keep the two horses in relative harmony, making something good and practical. VPRI seems to have started off with just the immortal horse (or, if you take the view that the project's members are gods, two immortal horses). In other words, I think you have it the wrong way round: it is precisely by caring about one's public that one fixes the rough edges so that the code is releasable and usable even when it's not finished (and it never is). This is the whole point of "release early, release often": stay in touch with the real world. I think it's scandalous that a publically-funded non-secret project does not have far stricter requirements for public engagement than are apparent here. I would add that the reason I care is because I have a great deal of respect for Ian Piumarta in particular: I was blown away by his Virtual Virtual Machine work when I went to INRIA Rocquencourt in 1999, greatly impressed by his code generation work on Smalltalk (at least that did get out the door), and really excited when I first came across COLA. This stuff should be out there! -- http://rrt.sc3d.org _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
