?Can't agree more with Thomas.
For most of the programmers out there, the best way to 'get in touch' with
the project is to see the actual guts;
leave the shiny presentations for sponsors and marketing people ;-)
For example, the OMeta release was hugely successful - I find more and more
applications of it, in completely
different projects from different areas of computing, while other parts of
FoNC remain only barely known, if at all,
to people outside of this mailing list.
-- Oleksandr Nikitin
-----Original Message-----
From: Reuben Thomas
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 2:45 PM
To: Fundamentals of New Computing
Subject: [fonc] Show Us The Code!
I started reading with interest the October 2010 STEPS Progress
Report, then as soon as I got to the first screenshot, was overcome by
a familiar feeling of depression: I strongly suspected, and quickly
confirmed, that there was no code I could try.
We've been over this ground in the past, and have seen two related
arguments for not following the dictum "release early, release often":
1. "It's not ready".
2. "We don't have time to support people trying to build non-production
code."
To which the answers are, respectively:
i. You don't understand "release early, release often".
ii. You don't understand "release early, release often".
Subscribers to this list do not, on the whole, care if code coming out
of VPRI is buggy, non-portable, pre-alpha, or will only run correctly
at a certain phase of the moon. We will quite happily help each other
build and play with it. We understand that you have better things to
do than support it, and also that in a few months time you may have
thrown it all away and started again.
I, personally, often don't even try building such code; I just want to
know that other people can!
You still seem to be stuck in the mentality of wanting to produce a
finished product. But in computing we all know there is no such thing.
Releasing unfinished, half-baked code will NOT turn people off. In
fact, the effect is exactly the opposite: a huge marketing WIN!
If you still doubt me, just look at the number of questions about
building Ian Piumarta's idst repo, which has only seen one, trivial,
commit this year.
Releasing a technical report on software without code is like
publishing a review of a new piece of music but not the score: it's
tantalizing, but essentially useless. By waiting until you think you
have something worth releasing, you are losing years—YEARS!—of free
marketing and buzz. And you need it! Competitors doing merely
evolutionarily cool stuff will consign your entire project to the
dustbin of history, if you don't get people excited about what you're
doing, and if we're lucky, someone else will pick up the ideas in a
few decades when they have dwindled to a mere stepwise advance, just
before they become actually redundant.
The history of computing is littered with just such lost
opportunities; please don't become yet another.
--
http://rrt.sc3d.org
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