[SLL] faking Unix knowledge? pretend to know open source Unix?

[Jesse Keating]

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 13:54 -0800, Chuck Wolber wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Jesse Keating wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:37 -0800, Dave Dennis wrote:
> > > More like Write Once and shove your problem off on the operations 
> > > team.
> > 
> > I think that accurately describes the situation.
> 
> No. This is a common logical falacy. Just because something was done 
> badly, it does not mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater.
> 
> You have to prove that WORA in and of itself is a bad idea. It is not 
> reasonable to assume that since you have seen it done badly 100% of the 
> time that the idea of WORA is then a bad idea unless you can say that the 
> reason it was done badly 100% of the time is because WORA itself is 
> flawed. To do that, you have to articulate why WORA itself is flawed in 
> the absence of developer's ham-handed attempts to implement it.
> 
> In other words, it is not enough to say an idea is flawed because "I have 
> never seen it succeed"... At best, "I have never seen it succeed" means 
> you suspect there may be something wrong, but you cannot nail it down to 
> whether it is a conceptual problem or an implementation problem.
> 
> ..Ch:W..
> 

I didn't claim that WORA itself is a bad idea.  What I claim is that at
least in the java world, the lure of WORA never pans out.  But because
it's /supposed/ to be WORA, any time it doesn't do that, it's the
operations side's fault not the coder.

I think WORA as a lure is by nature bad.  It's extremely difficult to
get WORA right, particularly when the 'A' includes multiple vendors
trying to produce the same environment (java).  You have a Sun java
codebase, a HP code base, an IBM code base, a gcc (gcj) code base, each
of them with their own little quirks and differences, despite all trying
to be "Java" compliant.  The only shiny note on the horizon is OpenJDK,
Sun opening the code to it's Java so that bringing Java to new (and
existing) platforms means porting the existing code, rather than
creating entire new code bases from scratch.  This potentially puts it
in the same arena of say Python.  If you want Python for your platform,
you get the Python source and you work with it.  You don't have to start
from scratch, and there is really one Python vendor, python.org.  It
remains to be seen if OpenJDK will solve some of these problems,
particularly if it'll get taken up on these other platforms.  Until then
WORA will lure people in, and they'll fall into the trap before it's too
late to get out.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (http://jkeating.livejournal.com)
Fedora Project          (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
identi.ca               (http://identi.ca/jkeating)
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