From: Rob Sacks (editor_at_realization.org)
Date: 2001-05-10 21:55:07
Over the last few days, a couple of people have
mentioned open-source software. I don't know
which program they are referring to, but just to
avoid any possible misunderstanding, I thought
I had better explain that my program would not be
suitable for this purpose.
It was written very hastily (in less than 3 months)
as a rough draft. My intention was to throw it
away when it was finished and then start over
with the real version. This is my normal method
when I'm not sure how to design the overall
architecture because invariably, whatever design
is chosen for the initial attempt turns out to be
a mistake. However, by learning from the mistake,
I am able to design something good for the
second try. But I lost interest and didn't make a
second version, so the only existing source code
is pretty poor. (A lot or programmers work this way.
It's even a formal methodology advocated in the
software engineering literature. I believe this idea
was pioneered at IBM in the 50s.)
Anyway, I'm getting off track here. The point is
that this source code is badly structured. One
of the main problems is that the whole graphic
system was built in a way that makes it difficult
to make mouseable controls, which I now recognize
was a very serious oversight. (The graphics probably
constitute 80 percent of the source code.)
For this reason alone, if I were to continue working
on this program for my own purposes, I would
rewrite it from scratch with a different graphics
architecture.
Another problem is that I didn't bother to put any
comments into the source code, which would make
it formidably difficult for other programmers to modify.
Then there is the issue of who will be the system
architect. In my experience, software projects
require that somebody (or several somebodies) take
responsibility for making sure that the whole
program has a good architecture. Otherwise the
individual pieces, made by different contributors,
don't work properly together. This is especially
important when the contributors are loosely-coordinated,
as they usually are in an open-source project. I
don't want this role or responsibility. HOwever, it seems
to me that if my program were used as the foundation
for an open-source effort, I would be inevitably be
thrust into this role.
Regards,
Rob
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : 2002-07-27 12:28:29 BST