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