OpenEuphoria

Re: Proposal

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Oct 12, 2001
• 375 views

rforno writes:
> RDS should select the user contributions which are most useful
> and, after asking their authors permission to do so, 
> transform them into Euphoria official software. 
> To this end, the code is to be adapted to the Euphoria
> standard, and a manual is to be provided, either from the 
> author or directly redacted by Euphoria personnel, 
> in any case responding to Euphoria standards. 
> Authorship should remain acknowledged. 
> Of course, these programs are to be "stamped".
> In this way, many efforts that today are dispersed will be consolidated and
> Euphoria's image will improve significantly.

There would be some benefits to having a 
completely integrated and consistent package
of code and documentation for users to download.

However, I think these benefits would be 
outweighed by the following:

  * Coding and documentation standards are both great 
     - if they are your own.  If someone is forcing you to 
     follow standards that do not suit your taste, it tends 
     to stifle your creativity and reduce your motivation 
     to write code or document things.

  * The users who contribute libraries and programs to 
     the Euphoria community are doing it as a hobby, 
     because they enjoy it. I'm not paying them anything,
     aside from the chance of getting free upgrades.
     It would not be appropriate for me to insist on standards
     for anything. I greatfully receive any user contributions
     that I can get. I can't afford to hire these people. Many of the 
     best ones already have good paying jobs as programmers.

  * I don't want to end up maintaining other people's code
    on top of the ever growing amount of my own code that I
    have to maintain.

  * Trying to keep numerous pieces of software and documentation
     firmly "in sync" tends to slow things down a lot. You end up 
     having to call a big meeting before you can make a small
     change to something (at IBM where I used to work on
     compilers, we said that I.B.M. stands for "In Big Meeting")

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com