Development quotes of the week

In the end, there is a fundamental issue with reporting bugs: it assumes our users are literate and capable of writing amazing prose that we will enjoy reading as the last J.K. Rowling novel (if you're into that kind of thing). It's just an unreasonable expectation: some of your users don't even speak the same language as you, let alone read or write it. This makes for challenging collaboration, to say the least.

Today Linux has reached world domination in various, sometimes surprising, ways. KDE has contributed its share to that. With Plasma it provides a slick and powerful desktop which does make Linux accessible to everyone. This mission has been accomplished. But there is more. Following KDE's vision of bringing freedom to people's digital life there are amazing projects exploring new areas through Free Software, be it an application such as Krita to bring freedom to digital painters, or a project such as WikiToLearn to create collaborative text books for education. When KDE people meet you can feel the enthusiasm, the openness, and the commitment to change the world to the better just as in the days of the beginning.

Most developer tools have nothing to charge for, and are not big or centrally organized enough to get venture or corporate funding. Projects that we use, or indirectly benefit from, every day. (Every app on your phone right now is using one of these projects in its software. I guarantee it.)

In other words, everybody is building software, but ignoring the tools we need to build them.

Even as a lighthearted joke (as here), it isn't helpful to the design process to categorise programming languages as being generically "better" or "worse" than each other, rather than seeing them as embodiments of different ways of thinking about algorithmic problem solving.