[Cryptography] Open Source developer employment agreements, was: Cue the blamestorming

tpb-crypto at laposte.net tpb-crypto at laposte.net
Wed Apr 23 06:18:14 EDT 2014


> Message du 23/04/14 04:41
> De : "Jerry Leichter" 
> A : "Steve Furlong" 
> Copie à : "Tom Mitchell" , "cryptography at metzdowd.com" , "ianG" 
> Objet : Re: [Cryptography] Open Source developer employment agreements, was: Cue the blamestorming
>
> On Apr 22, 2014, at 9:21 AM, Steve Furlong  wrote:
> > JavaDoc and its brethren take much inspiration from literate programming. If written properly, the generated documentation can come close to a book-style literate program. On most coding teams, I figure this is as good as we're likely to get.
> And how much success do you have getting programmers to produce decent Javadoc documentation?
> 
> I've been pushing hard to get people on my current project to produce decent Javadoc (and comments in general), but it's an uphill battle. In a previous job, we used a Javadoc-like tool for C++ whose name escapes me. A small team of hand-picked people who worked directly for me were pretty vigilant about writing appropriate comments - though some weren't very good at it, and I ended up re-writing most of their documentation-level comments. But beyond that, in the rest of the organization ... nada.
> 
> Unfortunately, once you've filtered out those who will do anything to avoid writing documentation/comments; and those who are willing but do such a mediocre job that it's barely worth the trouble; you don't have many people left. It's a real challenge.
> -- Jerry
> 

Jerry,

To achieve what you want we have two hurdles to overcome:
- Education: most of us code-monkeys are good at math and numbers, not language. When language becomes mandatory inside a system, ie. writing missives about our code, we slow down and lose a lot of time to do it. We ain't no Mark Twain, we more like Sir Isaac Newton, sorry;
- Time: we are trained to spit out code and solve issues and create features as fast as possible so our bosses can put things for sale before competition catches up, our survival depends on that speed. A demand which is compounded by the first issue about the fact that we are slow at language;

Once we have learned enough to code well, we also have learned to do it fast enough for survival. People won't change that until their professional survival is no longer at stake, that is our modus operandi.

The only way out of it seems to be the creation of a jedi order of sorts that would code very important software, like encryption, networking and storage systems for peanuts, but whose survival would be guaranteed by the larger community. By training a small number of very good coders in human language and giving them enough time, you can achieve all documentation dreams.


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