Simon Willison @simonw 2019-05-06
At the start of my career OOP was being hailed as the solution to the âcode re-useâ problem.
These days it looks like the true silver bullet was âreleasing code as open sourceâ
Simon Willison @simonw 2019-05-06
I wonder if developers who started out in the last 10 years are even aware that âsoftware re-useâ used to be classified as a problem? Every project found itself building fundamentals from scratch. OOP and class inheritance were pitched as the cure - reuse existing code!
Simon Willison @simonw 2019-05-06
Bah humbug. Kids these days donât know how good they have it!
Bob Ippolito @etrepum 2019-05-06
I didnât even learn version control tools until I started contributing to open source! Programming in the 90s was insane.
Simon Willison @simonw 2019-05-06
Yeah Iâve been thinking recently about how the combo of solid source control and CI/CD really has resulted in a significant multiplier in team-based (and individual) software development productivity - weâve got it so good!
Anyone else remember conversations circa 2001 about how OOP was going to finally free us from constantly re-writing the same code over and over again? With hindsight, we solved that problem with open source licensing and robust open source ecosystems around programming languages
- OOP was attempting to solve problems inside a code base. Open-source is about sharing a code base.
- Turns out OOP was yet another attempt at solving a social problem (sharing) with technology.
Simon Willison @simonw 2020-07-02
Love this categorization of open source as a âtacticâ.
I see OS as the solution to âcode reusabilityâ. When I was at uni in the early 2000s âcode reusabiiltyâ was THE big goal - itâs what OOP was meant to do.
Turns out the way to make code truly reusable is to open source it.
2020-07-02
Open source isnât philanthropy OR a business model. It is an important tactic but there are more incentives at play aside the code grant.
An incomplete list:
- selfish itch scratching (the ideal use case)
- shallow bugs (nice to have!)
- distribution (zero friction adoption)
Gary Fleming @garyfleming 2020-07-02
Thereâs a great @swardley talk that hits on Netflixâs usage of OSS as a strategy for reducing costs for production houses, so that more emerge, and they can reap those benefits.
Simon Willison @simonw 2020-07-02
By intra you mean within a large organization? I think open source makes that work much better too.
Sets clean expectations of how contributions work, means the maintainers are more likely to consider use-cases outside their own groups, and makes IP considerations more obvious
Simon Willison @simonw 2020-07-02
If a team in a large org is itself working with code thatâs open source (or that might be released as open source in the future) they wonât be blocked from using that organizations own existing code because itâs closed source
Simon Willison @simonw 2020-04-09
Iâd love to learn more about the COBOL development ecosystem. Does that ecosystem have answers for:
- version control
- unit/integration testing
- continuous integration
- open source libraries
- zero-downtime deployments
- linting
- code review https://https://t.co/tTawwLjLA9
Simon Willison @simonw 2020-04-09
My hunch is that those techniques are much more responsible for our modern era of massively improved software engineering productivity than programming language syntax improvements
Simon Willison @simonw 2020-04-09
I remember when I was at university in 2001-2004 the holy grail of software engineering was âcode re-useâ - everyone thought OOP and Java classes would solve that. Turns out the solution was open source libraries.