LK2008: The values of the Linux community [LWN.net]

LK2008: The values of the Linux community

Posted Oct 12, 2008 20:03 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
Parent article: LK2008: The values of the Linux community

I found "The value placed on the code by its developers became irrelevant, leading to 'paycheck coding.' There is no value placed on creativity; it is a model which leads to bad code." very questionable. Does paycheck building lead to bad buildings? Paycheck coding has a habit of producing code that actually usable and useful to someone other than the developers...and note that many major Open Source programs are largely maintained and extended by paycheck coders.

LK2008: The values of the Linux community

Posted Oct 13, 2008 23:58 UTC (Mon) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (1 responses)

Does paycheck building lead to bad buildings?

Modern "McMasion" style houses, built within the last few years during America's housing bubble, are uniformly shoddy, hideous, inefficient, overlarge, and badly designed, in my opinion. Given that the impetus here was to get them built fast and sold fast, I would say the answer to your question is "yes".

LK2008: The values of the Linux community

Posted Oct 14, 2008 10:20 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

And you've never met the code that was quickly scraped together for personal use and continued to be used despite the fact that the output always needed to be hand-edited, when it worked well enough for that? Even working off your example, I'd say there is a lot of personal code out there that's "hideous, inefficient" and "badly designed". Furthermore, anything must be judged against the requirements; when "over"large is in demand, and efficiency not considered important, holding those against it is absurd. The tradeoff of "built fast" at the cost of being "shoddy" is not one unheard of in personal code, either.

Even accepting that, one example doesn't prove the whole case. Since virtually all buildings are paycheck buildings, you need to argue that virtually all buildings are bad buildings.