Jan Skibinski wrote, about Claus Reinke's 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.
The gratifying effect of writing a scientific paper is that one gets
across a worthwhile idea, and light-bulbs go on in a few heads; as a
side-effect, one may enhance one's reputation and career.
> 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.
In my case, the payoff has been of learning something +ve or -ve from
the process, and on rare occasions of having made something worth
using; it is very gratifying indeed if people then actually start
using it and getting its benefit, after a modest "sales campaign".
(But I've only written libraries in industry.)
There is a very general cultural problem about building biggish,
robust systems in universities; it's discussed in
On the importance of being the right size
Simon Peyton-Jones, pp 321-335 in Computing Tomorrow,
ed. Wand and Milner, CUP 1996
Maybe it's the sort of thing that is more likely to happen in research
labs (eg. Microsoft Cambridge, INRIA,...) than universities.
Peter Hancock
