The Industry choice

[Bulba!]

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 15:44:03 GMT, Roel Schroeven
<rschroev_nospam_ml at fastmail.fm> wrote:

>I was thinking more of end-user packages: if you somehow could lay your 
>hands on the source code of Visual Studio itself, you're still not 
>allowed to do anything with it.

And why would anybody want to waste their time reading the 
source code of Visual Studio? ;-) 

<duck>

No, honestly, after all most of the time what programmers learn
is just API. The very point of having libraries after all is not 
having to learn the low-level mechs of this thing, but just
using them in a push-button manner!

My boss read the C-tree code. I was programming reports 
and other "peripheral" stuff, so I never had to do it. I was
just using a subset of the C-tree functionality, and even that
was a very small subset actually. Now I'm sure that B-trees
used in there are a wonder of engineering - however, I simply
have other goals and not enough time to learn them to 
appreciate that.

Personally, I think that for most people the _direct_ benefits 
of access to source code are greatly exagerrated. I would
place much, much more emphasis on indirect, derived 
benefits of availability of source code. 

Yes, you CAN read the source code. But the point is, you
DON'T WANT TO. 

Because economically speaking, division of labor applies,
and idealistically speaking, it's better to stand on the shoulders
of giants.



--
It's a man's life in a Python Programming Association.