Terry Lambert wrote:
I think that is absolutely true. When I worked in a programming group for Siemens, I made a comment that I had never met a humble, good programmer. My department manager laughed so hard, that he snorted and had tears in his eyes.Kent Stewart wrote:In 40 years of using computers, nothing has changed. The system's people are still primadona's and do nothing wrong. Get used to it :). Unfortunately!! People don't install OSes because of the OS as much as the codes they can run on it. The importance tree is inverted. The people that think they are the most important are only there to provide improved tools to the people that users depend on.Standards compliance changes, in theory, are for the benefit to "the people that users depend upon". All other systems changes are pretty much gratuitous, unless they are to support hardware and/org add features. When Mike Smith first implemented ACPI, he got enough shit to push him out of the project; but it's damn cool that, on systems where it works, I can hit the power button, and the machine will gracefully shut itself down. If it's unfair to make certain changes (it is), then it's also unfair to bitch about certain changes (it is). Moving towards standards compliance will break all the places there are workarounds to standards non-compliance. You could therefore equally argue that these should be seperated out in the patches in ports, to ensure that "sudden compliance with standards" never broke anything. Yeah, there has been some primadona behaviour with architectural changes whose only compatability was whether or not the change was enabled with a kernel option. But the glove fits both parties, too.
I sort of think about the two sides like Patton did about Montgomery in WWII. The way I see it, if the systems people didn't think the way they do, we would not see the progress we see. I have always been involved with diagnosing problems on the user side. So I got to see the primadona behaviour on both sides. The systems people never made mistakes and the application programmers never did either. It was only the people that worked between them that got to see the truth :).
Kent
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Kent Stewart
Richland, WA
http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html
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