This morning was the big “Dart language” unveil – the Dart websites are up at http://dartlang.org and http://dart.googlecode.com. And already many seasoned Javascripters have the knives out. I’m surprised for a couple of reasons: the first, this isn’t quite as big a deal as many people thought it would be (me included), both in terms of the scope of the system and the distance to Javascript. Second, the system isn’t quite as finished as many predicted: this isn’t going to be usable for a little while.
(For those looking for an rpm rant, sorry, this isn’t it….!)
Currently there’s a ticket in front of FESCo asking whether or not alternative dependency solvers should be allowed in Fedora’s default install. For those who don’t know, the dependency solver is the algorithm which picks the set of packages to install/remove when a user requests something. So, for example, if the user asks for Firefox to be installed, the “depsolver” is the thing which figures out which other packages Firefox needs in order to work. On occasion, there is more than one possible solution – an obvious example often being language packs; applications usually need at least one language installed, but they don’t care which.
Just yesterday people jumped on the biographies and abstract for a talk at goto: the Keynote is Google’s first public information on Dart, a “structured programming language for the world-wide web”. Beyond knowing a couple of the engineers involved – which allows a certain amount of inference to take place – there’s also some speculation that Dart is what this “Future of Javascript” email referred to as “Dash” (this seems entirely possible: a dash language already exists; Google already used ‘Dart’ for an advertising product but have since stopped using that name, potentially to make way for the language).
Scott James Remnant blogged his ideas about how to improve the quality of Ubuntu releases recently, triggering some discussion at LWN about the topic. I offered some opinions about Ubuntu which are not terribly interesting because I don’t get to use it often; however, I did also write about Fedora based on the last couple months’ experience of Fedora 15 & 16.
Before I get to that, at roughly the same time, Doug Ledford was posting his thoughts about the “critical path” process – essentially, saying it was broken. I’m pretty sure he will find vociferous agreement with his views, based on previous feedback, but not (alas) from me.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been pondering the above question for a number of different reasons. For people who really study programming, like I attempt to, there are a number of claims/myths/legends/tales that are commonly held about people who cut code for a living, such as:
- some programmers, the “alphas”, are as much as ten times more efficient than the common programmer;
- there are people who “get” computers, and those who don’t. Cooper splits these into “humans” and “homo logicus”. Those who don’t grok computers are destined to never be able to program;
- there are people who are paid to cut code, and who simply can’t – they rely on auto-complete IDEs, cut’n’paste library code, etc.;
For the purposes of this post, I’ll separate between these different concepts: the “goats” (people who cannot code, at all), the “sheep” (people who code, perhaps professionally, but poorly) and the alphas. Sheep and alphas are collectively referred to as coders.
Last night, we decided to order pizza – we don’t do it often, it’s lazy but sort of a treat. However, out of the three local well-known places, only one was open: the other two had shut down early. Now, we don’t live in London per se, but Croydon (where there were major fires and a member of the public was shot just a night ago) is only a few miles east, and Clapham a few miles north. Sutton, the local town, had some windows broken by youths, but to be honest this isn’t exactly exceptional behaviour in Sutton.
Many words have been expended on this situation. I don’t have an awful lot to add about the project side of things: I think it’s immensely sad that OpenOffice.org is being forked again (this is much more clearly a fork than LibreOffice was), but fundamentally all actors within the free software world are autonomous and have free will. Such is life.
(this is a deeply opinionated blog post. feel free to skip it, take it with a grain of salt, whatever.)
This has been an interesting election. I’ve talked about previous ones before, and to be honest this one has felt a little bit of a let-down. I do wish that there were more candidates on offer: while this isn’t a criticism of the quality of people standing, I think they tend to represent a relatively narrow set of Fedora developers and users.
Anyhow, I’ve voted. I’m not going to disclose who I voted for or why, but here are the guiding principles I used:
This is a follow-up post to my previous one.
I was really pleased with the feedback on my idea for Fedora Greeters, from both established Fedora community members and not. Equally, I got feedback offline as well – and I should make it clear right now that I’m more than happy to receive such communication; the amount of trepidation shown by some I think just highlights some of the problems.
One thing which is really interesting is that much of the feedback wasn’t of the form, “Yeah, I agree, [this thing] sucks and really needs to be improved”. People decided to give me, instead, their own story – you can see a couple of them in the comments of my blog. Of course, these are just anecdotes and must be treated carefully, but I thought it was extremely interesting that people approached the issue in a manner more like, “Well, this was my experience..”
I’ve been watching the Ubuntu “power users” group set up with enormous interest. Although Ubuntu has aimed squarely at being easy to use, I’ve never seen it as being particularly unfriendly toward power users, and the idea of needing a specific area in which people can talk about power user issues seems somewhat odd. However – judging from the activity, it seems to have hit a real nerve. Whether or not it is a good idea in the long term remains to be seen: I’m firmly of the opinion that splitting communities into factions is a bad idea, so how they will overcome that in time will be a challenge, but clearly it’s meeting a real need.
