On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Claus Reinke wrote:
[List of some examples of library status information..]
They are all fine and useful. But I do not see any clear
incentives for authors for doing so, apart from their
desire to make libraries perfect .. in their spare time,
if any, of course. If the develepment of good libraries
had similar gratifying effects as publishing scientific
papers the situation could have looked quite differently,
I guess.
I just read "Heath B.O'Connell, Physicists thriving with
paperless publishing", e-print physics/0007040, (on
"xxx.lanl.gov"), and I was amazed to learn how well this
paperless revolution works there, notwithstanding all
sorts of extra efforts needed for this to work as smoothly
as it does. But there _is_ a strong incentive to be quickly
read, and in the same token, to access information as
quickly as possible.
But what kind of gratification one gets from writing
a library, good or bad? Don't ask me, I have not seen
any so far, unless when I do something strictly commercially.
Secondly, I have not seen any real peer review on this
level. I cannot speak for others, but the feedback I receive
does not count; sporadic encouragement is not what is
important here and web access statistics is useless too.
Long time ago ISE Eiffel had so-called EifellShelf, where
contributions from third parties were carefully scrutinized
by a group at ISE in order to assure quality and conformance
to standards. I do not know whether this model is still
in operation, but I really liked it then, even though
I had to put my commas and blank spaces just right, or
put assertions where I had considered them unncecessary
at first. It did not harm my pride at all, and it really
helped everyone on a long run.
Jan
