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chromatic (983)

chromatic
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Journal of chromatic (983)

Wednesday January 03, 2007
05:15 PM

Whither Visible Progress?

[ #32067 ]

I scour Planet Gnome and Planet KDE daily as part of my duties as official free software guy at $work. For months I've tried to answer several questions:

  • Why do things appear to move so quickly?
  • Why are there so many participants?
  • Why do their projects and sub-projects get so much attention?
  • What can we learn from them?

I realize that making comparisons is reasonably silly, but I can't shake these questions. Also, the easy answers ("People care more about shiny GUI applications than programming languages") are full of empty calories. The correct answer may even be "Your perception of their progress and the Perl world's lack of apparent progress is wrong."

I don't expect to have any answers soon. I just thought they were interesting questions.


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  • I'd say it's a modified version of the first: "You can't compare applications and languages." Developers seem to tend to contribute more to application projects than languages. In fact, one of the things I like about the Perl way is that CPAN tends to smoothen the line separating both.
    --
    Ordinary morality is for ordinary people. -- Aleister Crowley
    • I'd agree that you can't compare. The major difference is that Perl activity is the sum of the people working in Perl and the people working on Perl, whereas with an application, you're just looking at the people working on it - not to mention that the people working in Perl are much more diverse and harder to measure. The total developer activity could well actually be about the same between Gnome/KDE and Perl.

  • I completely understand why GUIs attract so much attention. That's what initially attracted me to Web programming and is one of the reasons why Perl disappointed me when I first got into the language. GUIs are tremendously important, but serious programmers often dismiss them because so many GUI creators are so terribly bad at it that they produce pretty piles of junk. Those who appreciate the power of a GUI can produce tools that are tremendously productive, but they aren't as "sexy". For example, GUI

  • I think it has to do with closeness.

    People don't care in general about things they can't use directly. They do care about the things they use directly.

    Case in point: PPI vs perlcritic

    PPI is a generalised parsing module for Perl, perlcritic makes the actual judgement calls and provides the actual interface to users.

    I think it would be a pretty fair call to say there's FAR more interest and excitement and debate about perlcritic than about PPI.

    As a tool/component, PPI has a potential worldwide direct userbase

  • Hmm.

    Speculating wildly...

    Work done on related projects has a good chance (at least in the mind of the programmer) of being included with the main project provided they work hard enough and do a good enough job. I use this mini-law to explain Linux's popularity over BSD even though BSD was far more mature, stable, clean, and complete -- Linux actually benefited from needing work. It adopted programmers, so to speak, and then they became part of the family. Conversely, in Parrot, it's harder to imagine a s
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