The Industry choice

[Steve Holden]

Paul Rubin wrote:

> Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> writes:
> 
>>>It seems to me
>>>that IDLE and a lot of the rest of Python are examples of someone
>>>having a cool idea and writing a demo, then releasing it with a lot of
>>>missing components and rough edges, without realizing that it can't
>>>reasonably be called complete without a lot more work.
>>
>>^Python^open source^
> 
> 
> I wouldn't say so.  I'd say the Linux kernel, GCC, Emacs, Apache,
> Mozilla, etc. are all developed with a much more serious attitude than
> Python is.  Of course there are lots of other FOSS programs that
> someone wrote for their own use and released, that are less polished
> than Python, but that are also the subject of less advocacy than Python.

Well clearly there's a spectrum. However, I have previously written that 
the number of open source projects that appear to get stuck somewhere 
between release 0.1 and release 0.9 is amazingly large, and does imply 
some dissipation of effort.

Give that there's no overall coordination this is of course inevitable, 
but some open source projects are doomed from the start to be incomplete 
because the original authors have never been involved in producing 
software with a reasonably large user base, and so their production 
goals and quite often their original specifications (where there are 
any) are unrealistic.

These projects meander towards a half-assed initial implementation and 
then become moribund.

This is not to tar respectable projects like Linux, many (but not all) 
of the Gnu projects, and Python with that same brush, and personally I 
think the Python *core* is pretty solid and quite well-documented, but I 
don;t regard IDLE as part of the core myself. Since I'm not an active 
developer, this may not be in line with python-dev's opinions on the matter.

regards
  Steve
-- 
Steve Holden               http://www.holdenweb.com/
Python Web Programming  http://pydish.holdenweb.com/
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