[IGDA_indies] open source survival

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Brian Hook wrote:
>
> http://www.poshlib.org (Portable Open Source Harness)

I'll look at it some time.  Briefly, why did you not build on GNU
Autoconf or some other such tool?

> Just because something isn't perfect or isn't appropriate for YOU
> doesn't rule it out for everyone else.

Well duh.  Some people *love* C++, which I consider to be a complete
waste of time.

> Your attitude towards Python
> seems to be, uh, very well known, and a lot of people disagree.

Nobody disagrees that Python is slow.  I'd use Python if I wanted to
write slow games, but my simulationist interests drive me towards more
complicated, higher performance languages.  I want to have my garbage
collection cake and eat it too.  Please don't tell me that Psyco is some
kind of godsend, it isn't.  I think Python will probably speed up in the
next few years and become a better performing language, but I'm working
with what's available today.

Some molecular visualization stuff aside, I don't see evidence of Python
having gotten beyond the toy "we've got an OpenGL wrapper!" stage.  It
doesn't have the oomph for 3D graphics, so people script with it, using
C or C++ code for the heavy lifting.  I don't believe in that kind of 2
language development model.  A language should manipulate its primitives
efficiently and should scale to the level of problem the programmer
wants to work upon.  I find Python is great when it stays within its own
world, and tacky when you step outside of its world.  On the positive
side, if you are going to accept C++ as part of your development,
Boost.Python and SWIG are both focused on it.

> I don't think Python is very good,

I think Python is excellent at what it does.  It has simple, clean
syntax, making it the easiest 'powerful' language for anyone to learn.
The ease of newbie adoption is proven in the field.  If you read the
Python Success Stories http://www.pythonology.org/success you will see
that it is a proven process control language.  Python is starting to be
used for 'big applications' development, ala Chandler.
http://osafoundation.org/Chandler_Compelling_Vision.htm .  One of the
guys on this project is a Seattle local.  He does not see evidence of
maturity for 'big applications' development yet, i.e. the size of office
suites.  It's not the sort of thing the Python community has really
produced.

Humongous Entertainment proved that Python is commercially viable for
games - as long as they're adventure games.  Python can do slow games
just fine.

> > rule of thumb is if the project doesn't have a VC++ .sln or .dsw
> > file, they aren't serious about Windows compatibility.
>
> I vehemently disagree.  Integrating open source into a project is
> never going to be a drop in,

The damn things don't even build if you don't have .sln or .dsw.
Absence of VS project files indicates that the project gets almost no
testing under Windows.  How many open source packages did you try to get
working on Windows last year?  Like I said, I want my $1/project.

>
http://bookofhook.com/Article/GameDevelopment/TipsforOpenSourceDevelope.
html

One of the problems is, most programmers are not marketers.
Documentation is a grey area between functionality and marketing.
Especially when you talk about nice, neat websites to present the
project.  You and I may agree that "It's All About Marketing," but the
vast majority of UNIX programmers do not.  And, let's face it, they're
providing the bulk of the open source culture.  An article on UNIX vs.
Windows culture:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html

The only comment of yours I definitely disagree with, is how everyone
should use .zip.  .zip is not as good compression as .bz2, and a lot of
the world does actually download stuff via dialup.  tar.something is
UNIX standard and if you're doing something on UNIX, that's definitely
what you should be using.  The vast majority of open source projects
I've seen do indeed provide .zip files for their Windows distributions,
because .zip is standard on Windows.  Even if they don't, these are
programmer projects, and I think downloading 7-zip is the least of
worries.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
                                - Ed Mckenzie