On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Reuben Thomas <r...@sc3d.org> wrote: > > 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
This could well be. How else should an ambitious research project start off? Research in general involves incubating fragile ideas that might not be ready to face what you call the "real world" (assuming earth is more real than heaven :) Money, users, releases, etc. > 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 One man's rough edge is another's great idea in the making :) > 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. Scandalous! :) Actually, in my experience, many publically (sic) -funded projects don't have public repositories that are updated in real-time (like many of ours are). So the scandal may be more widespread than we initially suspected! > 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! Ian does do great stuff. And much of his work is out there: http://piumarta.com/software/ And there is more coming. But please consider what I said about incubating great ideas. Dan _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
