... but evolution will also quite happily run you over a cliff which you have been avoided if intelligence were applied.
Not to mention the fact that the bazaar is never going to put a man on the moon.
And yes, I wrote that piece.
Not to mention the fact that the bazaar is never going to put a man on the moon.
And yes, I wrote that piece.
What you have to consider is that individual cells evolved, until they created a whole greater than themselves. No individual cell was in control of that first step Armstrong took onto the moon. Likewise, what we end up creating from so much "bazaar" development will almost certainly accomplish something amazing...
...without any of us being able to take credit for it.
I think we can see abundant proof evolution can go a long way towards that specific goal.
The reason your work machine, running BSD, works the way it does (and self-assembles that way) is because each part of its software environment is independent, designed for different goals and constraints and it just happens to work together well enough you can work with it. It would be easy to standardize Unixes, but then you wouldn't be able to compile M4 for Windows or use one of the 26 FORTRAN compilers absent from your system. Also, what happens when you realize your design led you to a dead end? Evolution usually has plans B to Z built in. It's really difficult to make something evolve into a corner.
Having plans B to Z built-in has an impact on the overall elegance and purity of the design.
No, that's not the case at all actually. FreeBSD like the other BSDs is a complete OS, designed and built as a complete OS. It is not a collection of random tools by various people thrown together like a linux distro is.
arcueid ~ $ du -hs /usr/src
728M /usr/src
arcueid ~ $ du -hs /usr/src/contrib/
307M /usr/src/contrib/
Compared to that, in something like Debian the GNU tools, designed and built by the GNU with the intention to form a complete OS, probably constitute a greater proportion of the core OS.
Except that GNU ls was not designed to run on top of the Linux kernel, which is, on my book, a feature rather than, as you imply, a bug.
And if, next week, I write a better ls, I can install it and use it.
Also I know NASA is famous for their solid code, but personally I still question the amount of effort that goes into it. Just because their approach works (if you can afford it) doesn't prove that there couldn't be a more effective way.
I suppose with infinite money you can make quite a lot of approaches work. You could have an army double check every line of code. Instead of pair programming, why not have 10 programmers look over each others shoulders?
Lastly, lots of intelligent beings happily drive over cliffs all the time, just look at the financial crisis.
Bingo: it's all about the economics of various tradeoffs. If I have a company that puts together web sites for small companies in the area, and we have NASA style coding standards, we're going to completely price ourselves out of the market. If NASA applied "little web shop" coding standards to their projects, they'd be lucky to get anything up in the air before it exploded.
The important thing is to be on the curve though, not behind it, meaning to make the best of the tradeoffs the economics of what you're doing push you towards.
Spacex's "careers" page has a whole lot of "linux" jobs listed, so the Bazaar at least seems to be contributing heavily to potential future space travel: http://www.spacex.com/careers.php
Unfortunately, those statements seem to be contradictory; the United States ran the Apollo program for national pride, to cow the Soviets, not out of some grand desire to visit the moon. The science done by Apollo was secondary, and if you believe exploring space was a primary goal, you are going to have a hard time with the question, "why haven't we done it lately?"
Maybe you will not accept this statements for similar reasons like the ones driving your essay.