Re: Mummy, I made a platform in my pants! [Was: focus!]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Jeff Waugh wrote:
> A fucking amazing platform isn't an accident, and we need a fucking amazing
> platform to bring more developers to GNOME - both internal developers and
> external developers. One of our *crucial* audiences must be  FLOSS hackers
> and ISDs. If we don't satisfy them, we can't build our own momentum for
> building this amazing software stack, and we can't build an ecosystem with
> opportunities for everyone else.

I agree with you for volunteer developers; a simple, nice platform is 
pretty important.

For commercial developers, in my experience they usually ignore whether 
the API is pretty or pleasant... developers will come because there are 
users.

Platforms I've learned in the last 9 months:
 - HTML/JavaScript
 - Flash/ActionScript
 - Java/EJB3
 - C++/COM/Win32

These are some of the most successful platforms around. They are mostly 
pretty bad in various ways; in many ways GNOME/Linux is better, in some 
ways it's worse.

But the fact is that even though IE/HTML/JavaScript and Win32/C++/COM 
compete as two of the most irritating platforms I can imagine, 
commercial developers write for them anyway.

That's because userbase trumps API aesthetics, and the fastest way to 
platform success is to have a lot of users.

To me the GNOME platform is pretty good in terms of API offered.

The largest "API" problems have to do with proprietary software; RPM and 
dpkg are not designed for third-party software, and the diversity of 
Linux distributions makes it even harder. The whole Linux ecosystem is 
set up assuming a single giant pool of built-from-source packages. Which 
has many advantages, but easiness for ISVs is not one of them.

Still though I'd say number of users is a bigger issue than anything 
like this.

> We can, and should, do both. :-)

I don't disagree, but I think the natural emphasis of a big horde of 
programmers (including myself) is to think 95% of the time about how to 
improve the platform to make their own lives nicer, and 5% of the time 
about the actual point of the software for some audience, so when 
deciding what to cheerlead I'd tend to avoid the "go platform!" point of 
view. ;-)

Certainly GNOME tends to be badly skewed toward the platform side of 
things. I prefer working on APIs to working on UIs myself, I have to admit.

Havoc