The Art of Coding

On-line readings in the art of coding: what makes languages and programs succeed, and what makes them not.

CVS development group

Interesting notes on the process of a distributed development group.

"The CVS Development Group is not a Democracy"

Amazon.com Interview: Larry Wall

An interesting interview with Larry Wall. I noted this section:

It's interesting how the governance of the Perl community has evolved over time. It has actually turned out to be somewhat like the United States federal government. It used to be, way back in the Dark Ages, that I just ran the whole thing. I was Mr. Perl--judge, jury, and executioner. But these days the perl5-porters mailing list serves as the legislature. And we have an executive--which is not me, actually. It's whoever is currently the integration manager, essentially--the patch manager. We call that person the Patch Pumpkin Holder. That's the executive, and so that title moves from person to person, and that leaves me to be the Supreme Court. So I get to rule on what's constitutional or not.

A complete contrast to Tcl/Tk, and I predict the potential downfall of Tcl/Tk if it can't move out of the "Dark Ages."

The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond

Celebrated paper about the "bazaar" style of software development exemplified by the Linux operating system. Presented at the 1997 Perl conference, apparently highly influential in Netscape's decision to publically release the source code of their browser suite.

Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big, Richard P. Gabriel

Why Lisp failed... Read the section called The Rise of "Worse is Better".

The Culture of Perl, Larry Wall

Wall's keynote address to the first Perl conference. Some interesting insights...

Finally, I believe that any language essentially should be out of control, because no one person or institution is capable of controlling a language (or a culture, for that matter) without destroying it. Living languages are always a cooperative effort, and I want Perl to be a living language.

Information Wants to be Valuable, Keith W. Porterfield

Perl-related, again, but a useful summary of why free software is so important. The title is Larry Wall's quip on Richard Stallman's (I think) "Information wants to be free."