On 1/2/2010 1:14 AM Xah Lee said...
These books are the bedrock of the industry. It is not because people are impatient, or that they wish to hurry, but rather, it is the condition of the IT industry, in the same way modern society drives people to live certain life styles.
Turing complete. Once you've learned to program, learning dialects is a different study. I hated Word Perfect early on, but if I were faced with it today I expect that everything I know about word processing would kelp to deploy it effectively with minimal in-depth knowledge of it's peculiarities. Likewise, I don't work in perl, but I don't hesitate to deploy and modify perl projects to my needs, and mostly having only brushed up on the semantics that need to change.
No amount of patience or proselytization can right this, except that we change the industry's practice of quickly churning out bug-ridden software products to beat competitors. Companies do that due to market forces, and the market forces is a result of how people and organizations actually choose to purchase software. In my opinion, a solution to this is by installing the concept of responsible licenses. Please see this essay Responsible Software Licensing and spread the word.
Licensing programmers isn't likely to turn Microsoft around. Enforcement doesn't carry much weight with them. Let's work to strengthen that, then there's a functioning mechanism in place to work with.
Not-holding-my-breath-ly y'rs, Emile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
