How do *REAL* programmers work?

[Erik Price]

On Thursday, February 12, 2004, at 03:23PM, Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:

>I know a lot of good jokes start out "REAL programmers don't" but I'd like
>to know how *REAL* programmers work in the FOSS world. But I'd like to
>narrow down the programmer definition I'm looking for to the type of work
>I've been doing - business applications programmers. I'm not claiming that
>kernel developers or command-line PerlMonks are any less worthy, far from
>it.

I always thought kernel developers and device driver writers were the people that the capitalized term "Real Programmers" (tm) referred to.

>I've seen bits and pieces of these tools - Eclipse, Komodo, etc. Is this
>kind of development going on in Linux? Is it practical? Is there anyone on
>the list who does this kind of development or knows someone who does? To see
>how a developer works like this would be killer, imho. I'd be very
>interested in a presentation on this kind of thing. 

I'd be hesitant to call myself a "Real Programmer" in any sense of the words, considering how much I have still to learn.  That said, I do make my living writing code for a system that is not different in concept to the one you described in your example.  The difference is that the general attitude toward open source technology in my environment, amongst the decision-makers at least, is one of ignorance (as in, not knowing anything about it, and unwilling to listen to the very few of us who are in favor of it).  This is especially ironic since it is a project handled by a Very Large Computer Company That is Gaining Widespread Recognition For Being Associated With Linux.

Although it's not F/OSS, we use WebSphere Studio Application Developer IDE, which is basically the F/OSS Eclipse with a bunch of proprietary extensions.  However, Perl is used in some places for basic administrative scripting (not within the application itself).  The choice of Perl seems more due to its ubiquity than to any of its virtues of being FOSS.  The one pro-F/OSS change I am glad to have had an active part in is promoting the use of JUnit, which is also F/OSS.  My next goal is to push Ant for doing builds, since there are so many great Ant extensions available.  When I first started, I could hardly believe that Ant and JUnit were not already in use, since I was under the impression that they were pretty much the unanimously acknowledged standard for Java development these days, but I guess that shows that F/OSS still has a ways to go in some cases.

I think the use of a JUnit-like unit testing library is probably the one piece of F/OSS that I would expect every business application development environment OR open source project to have, at the very least, regardless of programming language or other factors.



Erik