[Solar-general] un texto de Eric Raymond: ¿quienes pueden programar?

Dom Feb 29 20:43:28 CET 2004

Hola,

Esto de las certificaciones me recuerda un parrafo del
brillante libro "The Art of Unix Programming " de
Eric  Raymond (es algo que todos los miembros de la comunidad
deberian leer, esta online en 
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/, no se lo pierdan!)

"Another important dimension along which operating systems differ is the height of the
barrier that separates mere users from becoming developers. There are two important cost
drivers here. One is the monetary cost of development tools, the other is the time cost
of gaining proficiency as a developer. Some development cultures evolve social barriers
to entry, but these are usually an effect of the underlying technology costs, not a
primary cause.

Expensive development tools and complex, opaque APIs produce small and elitist
programming cultures. In those cultures, programming projects are large, serious
endeavors ? they have to be in order to offer a payoff that justifies the cost of both
hard and soft (human) capital invested. Large, serious projects tend to produce large,
serious programs (and, far too often, large expensive failures).

Inexpensive tools and simple interfaces support casual programming, hobbyist cultures,
and exploration. Programming projects can be small (often, formal project structure is
plain unnecessary), and failure is not a catastrophe. This changes the style in which
people develop code; among other things, they show less tendency to over-commit to failed
approaches.

Casual programming tends to produce lots of small programs and a self-reinforcing,
expanding community of knowledge. In a world of cheap hardware, the presence or absence
of such a community is an increasingly important factor in whether an operating system is
long-term viable at all.

Unix pioneered casual programming. One of the things Unix was first at doing was shipping
with a compiler and scripting tools as part of the default installation available to all
users, supporting a hobbyist software-development culture that spanned multiple
installations. Many people who write code under Unix do not think of it as writing code ?
they think of it as writing scripts to automate common tasks, or as customizing their
environment.

To design the perfect anti-Unix, make casual programming impossible."

(http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s01.html#id2888484)

O sea uno de los principios basicos de la filosofia de Unix (y del Software Libre)
es que no debe haber barreras que impidan a los usuarios transformarse en
desarrolladores.

La colegiacion obligatoria y las certificaciones son una barrera, 
que eleva el costo de pasar de ser simples usuarios a desarrolladores. Digamos no a las
certificaciones, colegiaciones obligatorias y todo este tipo de barreras.
Que cada uno demuestre lo que sabe en la cancha.

Saludos,
Pablo

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