I'm really not sure what this is all about, you are making broad
generalizations about programming which may not always hold. If anything
I'd say a good programmer understands and is willing to use a variety of
techniques. The trick is choosing the best technique for a given
situation.

> Bad programmers try to code something up using examples.

Prototyping? Tracer bullets? Strawmen?

> Good programmers know how to use APIs well.
> Very good programmers can write frameworks to solve problems.
> Excellent programmers can do the same reusing software.

Yeah... but when your goal is to produce the highest quality piece of
software that meets your requirements in the shortest amount of time, a
good programmer will be able to decide whether writing or reusing is the
better approach. You can _not_ say it is always better to reuse.

> I write code. All day. And I started the Maven integration.
> You cannot force me to shut up, as I cannot force you to collaborate.

I don't want to make you shut up. Perhaps my response was a bit too
harsh. I'm just saying, the pressure to merge code from another project
is not going to be received well by the people trying to get the work
done. Not as well as say... a patch would be.

(Not that I'm saying you should put together a patch. It might have been
useful a couple weeks ago when we started this discussion, but now that
dIon has suggested a plan we probably will go in that direction for now)

I don't mean to be overly negative here. I'm not inherently
anti-collaboration. I just wanted to explain some of the reasons why we
have not been investing a lot of effort in that right now.

I think your goal of merging efforts is an admirable one. However we
have not seen any contributions to maven from you. Plugging maven into
centipede as a documentation generator is neat (I guess) but from my
perspective seems pretty silly. Maven is not a documentation generator,
it happens to do that pretty well but that is not the goal. The goal is
to make our lives easier by reducing the amount of time to set up a
project, providing useful information about a project (metrics,
documentation, code cross reference, activity, et cetera) and present it
all in a well organized and standardized interface. 

Centipede seems more oriented to providing lots of flexibility, like
allowing people to define a different look and feel and such. While
we're slowly allowing more flexibility to creep into maven, things like
that actually work AGAINST our goal. We would like to, as much as
possible, see only one way of doing a given task and presenting a given
type of information, across ALL projects. 

This is not to say we do not have common ground for collaboration. I
just think that in general our projects have different goals, which is
why it is hard for us to see compelling reasons to merge/borrow/steal
code right now. This may be why certain maven developers (hi dIon!) have
responded less than warmly to your suggestions -- I suspect that we do
not see as much similarity as you do.

Thanks,
James


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