Re: [9fans] Plan ? (was: native install)

[tlaronde@polynum.com]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 01:34:12PM +0100, Steve Simon wrote:
> > This way (dot-it-your-self-way) we will "only" have one-man projects. . .
>
> True, if  anyone feels that a project is too big for them then
> by all means put a shout out on the list and see if anyone there wants to help.

Everything can not always be done as a collaboration; and the main
possibilities are in parallele works. This implies a kind of
independance.

Indeed, when there are several people working on the "same" thing, it's
because the thing has been thought, is consistent (hence: thought
by very few people, with one leading), so that it's an organized
hierarchy of "one man" works.

Take the example of TeX, METAFONT (the conversion of WEB/Pascal to
something compilable on the majority of systems).

When I started looking at what was going on, trying to make sense of the
thing, it was not possible to be several doing this; and since I didn't
know at the beginning, I couldn't obviously explain.

Now I know. But it would take me all the time to explain to someone
else, hence we would not be 2 doing the work, but 1 explaining without
doing, and the other trying to do without having understood by doing...

And the "collaborative" effort shows in the web2c result: things that
are common between all the pieces written by D.E.K. are implemented with
slight divergences for TeX and METAFONT, with variations in names, in
parameters and so on, because some have worked on TeX, while others
worked on METAFONT etc. The main task now is cleaning and deleting and
having the strict minimum of code.

And you can compare. Donald Knuth has done the work, the majority: the
code. And a bunch of people have contributed chunks for the compilation
framework. On one side, you have code (result) and consistency; on the
other side, you have _inhumanity_ since you have increasing of the
entropy that is disorder: order is unnatural, and is the mark of human
activity. "Open source" seems very natural in this sense: the bazaar...
--
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                 http://www.kergis.com/
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