Re:Libui: a portable GUI library for C
by dman on Saturday May 19, 2018 @09:58PM
(#17110756)
I find it a bit sad that this is the top comment. I have witnessed free software/OSS have tremendous amount of positive effect on the world, however as the years go by I can't help feeling that we have trained a generation of users to act in an entitled manner towards software that is free and often the labor of love of some fellow developer trying to get better at their craft.
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I view it a bit differently. I can't help feeling that we have trained a generation of devs to act in an entitled manner towards documentation that is easy and formerly seen as requisite as the code itself. Personally, I find documenting my projects a labor of love because it's where I can distill all of my hard work in a presentable format.
> I have witnessed free software/OSS have tremendous amount of positive effect on the world, however as the years go by I can't help feeling that we have trained a generation of users to act in an entitled manner towards software that is free and often the labor of love of some fellow developer trying to get better at their craft
The only issue I see with the parent comment is that it's a bit harsh. But it's good advice to someone "trying to get better at their craft": writing software, especially one intended to be used by others, without documentation, is generally poor practice. It's not entitled at all, as far as I can see: it's not saying "I should have documentation for this project I use for free"–as far as I'm aware, they're not even using it at all. They're just evaluating whether as an interesting project they might want to take a look at later.
What about the effect of harsh comments on the creators morale?
Yes, this is a thing, which is why I called it out for being harsh. I think that it could have been a bit nicer.
I've been programming for a long time, but if it's undocumented I don't use it, period. It takes too much time, gets too buggy, and I can just write it myself and understand it completely (and document it as I go).
Definitely agree that this has started happening in the last ~10 years. The solution is to convince programmers to maintain their own open-source projects so they can discover for themselves the reasons developers do this. (e.g. it's not magic or altruism, there are real reasons.)