Comments on: What’s the opposite of open source hacking?

By: Chris Tyler

Chris Tyler — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:26:42 +0000

I actually think we’re in agreement The “exact opposite” phrase primarily applies to maximum sharing vs. maximum secrecy of source code.

By: Simon

Simon — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:05:42 +0000

Yes, I agree – in most regards, open source and closed commercial development have quite a lot in common. In either case, you’re going to have multiple developers getting in each other’s way, which in turn creates the need for a variety of infrastructure – version control, bug tracking, robust build scripts, automated tests, continuous integration, etc. They need to be able to communicate well, and generally, to keep track of what the rest of the team are doing.

There are exceptions, but student coding projects rarely bear any resemblance to this. They’re usually small, so they never need to deal with growing complexity, all the things like bug tracking and automated testing that become important with complex systems. And they’re usually working on their own, so they don’t need the skills of working as part of a team. In short, they’re fine for teaching pure coding, but entirely unrealistic for teaching *development*.

By: Gijs

Gijs — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 20:54:59 +0000

I don’t want to be harsh, but clearly it’s been a long time since you did any homework. More often than not, when you get coursework in Computer Science programs, you’ll be required to work in groups. I’m currently doing an “Advanced” Software Engineering course, which deals with maintenance, tests, refactoring, yada yada, and one of the coursework assignments is being given a fairly large java project, and being told “don’t change any functionality, but improve the code” (in groups of 3 or 4). Using VC is “strongly recommended”. Said code has no unit tests (only functional ones, which require so many magic incantations that nobody in our class has gotten them to run yet, to my knowledge). It has duplicate code and broken architecture (cyclical dependency) issues. We write reports on a wiki. We do profiling analysis on existing projects. Etc. Etc.

Of course, you can give homework in a way that doesn’t teach you anything – but that’s a fault with the particular homework, not the concept of it.

Finally, there’s a “crawl before you walk” thing going on as well: if you can’t write code from scratch, don’t even think about trying to adapt someone else’s code in a Good way.