skill level of developers

skill level of developers

Posted Aug 8, 2006 11:19 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: skill level of developers by pb
Parent article: Quote of the week

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 From the very start, Linus insulted people who really know better - think of the famous Andrew Tanenbaum "Linux is obsolete" flamewar.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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