Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 20th Jan 2008 11:11 UTC
At Google's offices in Mountain View, California, KDE 4.0's release event has ended. Various KDE people have given presentations, and a set of them has been posted online. Among them is Aaron Seigo's keynote presentation, which is very interesting to watch, and gives you a very good idea of what the KDE project is trying to achieve with KDE 4 (I just finished watching). Other presentations have also been put online.
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Member since:
2005-07-07
That's the point. Knowing what's on the other side of the wall is the job of visionaries, not that of annoying know-it-all editors like me. If I did know, I'd be making money with it. All I do know is that it has been proven time and time again that incremental updates won't get you anywhere in the long term.
I actually think you're being hard on yourself here. We'll use the walking on an incline metaphor for incrementalism here. The problem with incrementalism is always with the cost of the next step. If you envision a person walking in a straight line up a slope you get the picture. The grade of the slope is determined by the quality of the code, and the amount of aggregated changed, additions, hacks, and bugfixes to the code. This leads to the fun problem the for every step forward the slope increases... Also, as coding norm changes, and new tools and techniques become established, the slope automatically increases over time.
I've never liked the wall metaphor, because it's not so much about leaping a barrier as it is about making a lateral, or even slightly backward movement in order to find a new path forward that has a less sheer slope. The problem isn't a wall, it's the ever increasing energy expenditure for that next step... This cost might not be exponential, but it can get steep quick.
There's actually an interesting contrast between the Linux kernel and the GNOME folks here. Linus said he'd keep plucking away at 2.6 until he couldn't-- Scanning Planet GNOME you regularly get to hear the cry: "Inncrementalism forever" (and there's mutterings of GNOME 3 there as well.). The scary part is that the 'kernel' part of the Linux kernel is rather small and has pretty strict code discipline, which favours incrementalism, and GNOME is not...
Edited 2008-01-21 16:40 UTC