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skill level of developersskill level of developersPosted Aug 3, 2006 16:08 UTC (Thu) by pb (guest, #39658)Parent article: Quote of the week
There are people that I have met who are smarter and more skilled at tasks than myself, and I respect them for that. However that intelligence and skill does not always translate into success, e.g. due to work habits, people skills, etc.
It can be beneficial to have a code reviewer or code manager that is less skilled at a task than the developer writing and submitting the code.
An extremely intelligent and skilled developer can write code that only he can understand. That code can be inadequately documented or beyond the ability of other developers to maintain or use. When a skilled developer needs to have code accepted by someone less skilled than himself this may require a process of documentation, education, and possibly some rewriting to make it understandable. Arguably such modified code will then be of higher quality and of higher value to the community.
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skill level of developers Posted Aug 8, 2006 11:19 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] I see some arrogance of the uneducated here. Yes, there is a value for simple, easy to understand code. This value is that it is easy to understand. It might contradict the thing you want to achieve. Sometimes you need some "magic" which normal coders don't understand. You might want to discuss this with such a "normal coder" to make sure it gets documented properly, but you don't want to change the code. For the "insult" that Linux started out with not very skilled persons: I think that's why Linux took up so many developers quickly, but scared away too elite ones. From the very start, Linus insulted people who really know better - think of the famous Andrew Tanenbaum "Linux is obsolete" flamewar. The problem with microkernels is not that they don't work (QNX was a very sane and working Unix-like real-time microkernel even back then), but that they fail so often, because this way of doing an OS requires definitely higher skill levels than doing it the Linux way. I don't know how to solve that, probably the elite programmers should rather gather around a more elitist development circle and do their own operating system (maybe start with Plan9), before porting their stuff back to Linux.
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