From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] gnupg or pgp for plan9? Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:02:15 +0200 From: uriel@cat-v.org In-Reply-To: <57a21f730603290109u5d84c41flba269d2ef2f4da0f@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 24c78ad2-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 >> It happens because engineers are too lazy or scared to try to >> understand the code they are modifying, and a layer seems safer. My >> case was 3 years of 2 code teams. Imagine 10 years of open-source- >> like distributed development :-( > > your experience tallies with slide 24 from jerome saltzer's "coping > with complexity": > > Why aren't abstraction, modularity, hierarchy, and layers enough? > - First, you must understand what you are doing. > - It is easy to create abstractions; it is hard to discover the > *right* abstraction. > - It is hard to change the abstractions later. > (ditto for modularity, hierarchy, and layers) Thanks for the pointer, this are the most interesting slides I have read in a long time. Here is the PDF version in case someone has not read them yet: http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/Saltzerthumbnails.pdf I'm starting to suspect that the more resources a software project has, worse are the result. Maybe that means that there is hope for Plan 9; while we barely survive, the rest of the world with 10000 times more resources invests all those resources in shooting themselves in the foot... with XML bullets, of course. uriel