Nothing to do - for a creative developer [LWN.net]

Nothing to do - for a creative developer

Posted May 19, 2016 12:18 UTC (Thu) by hkario (subscriber, #94864)
In reply to: Nothing to do - for a creative developer by NAR
Parent article: Old projects and the free-software community

and even if not that, then the other barrier is that it's written in C, not the "hot" and desired by "kids these days" Go, Node.js or Ruby

most people want to have fun or learn something, doing proper engineering is neither of those things

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Nothing to do - for a creative developer

Posted May 20, 2016 8:09 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (3 responses)

Updating a build system is not even proper engineering, it's janitorial work.

Nothing to do - for a creative developer

Posted May 20, 2016 16:14 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

This viewpoint is probably why so many project's buildsystems are crappy.

Nothing to do - for a creative developer

Posted May 20, 2016 17:42 UTC (Fri) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

In the same sense as fixing bug is not proper engineering but janitorial work.

Lots of satisfying work to do - for creative janitors

Posted May 21, 2016 7:24 UTC (Sat) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

It never pays to despise "janitorial work".

"make veryclean" is the first target I write in my makefiles, and it often needs enhancements.

Places where nobody bothers to do the cleaning and tidying become increasingly hostile and energy-sapping places to work. This applies in physical environments, and it applies in software projects.

And, setting up a good build system which is easy to work with, easy on beginners, and easy to keep tidy is worthy engineering in its own right.