Erics Neunzehn

Nachdem die Entwicklung der Synchronopse weitestgehend beendet ist, arbeite ich gerade daran die wichtigsten Aussagen, mit denen ich meine Rezipienten konfrontieren will, in einen schönen Container zu packen. Um mir meiner wichtigsten Aussagen wieder bewusst zu werden und mich ein wenig heiß zu machen, lese ich mir viele alte Niederschriften durch. Unter Ihnen finden sich Eric Raymond’s neunzehn Regeln aus seinem Text The Cathedral and the Bazaar, einer Abhandlung über Softwareentwicklung nach dem Open-Source-Prinzip. Der Text ist an der Entwicklung einiger Open-Source-Projekte aufgezogen, aus denen er allgemeine Beobachtungen ableitet. Die Regeln fungieren als Eckpfeiler seiner Beobachtungen. Überraschend ist, wie gut einige davon auch in ein Handbuch für gute Gestaltung passen würden. Spätestens bei Regel drei, wisst ihr, was ich meine.

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.“ (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. (Linus’s Law)
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. „Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.“
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.