[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev's DevMUD: a word of caution

["Adam J. Thornton" <adam#phoenix,Princeton.EDU>]

On Sat, Oct 31, 1998 at 10:49:47PM +0100, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Not _text_ output :). Anyway, it is to be executed, it meets some
> requirements, it is a software project.  And I think it is excellent...
> (Except for some limitations (dictionaries, which makes encapsulated
> postscript somewhat tricky))

It's basically Forth, isn't it?

Whether that is a good or a bad thing is open to debate.

What we can learn from Fred Brooks and Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and
the Bazaar" is, in my view, this:

A waterfall model, rigidly hierarchical, works reasonably well for projects
which have full time staff and does not have a changing target to
implement.  It is the latter that has caused most of the problems in recent
years as the product life of a specific version of anything has shortened:
there is no real way to do a full waterfall model on a large project and
still keep it adaptable to customers' (or the market's) changing needs on a
non-geologic timeframe.

The first reason is more important for us: we *have* to go with a bazaar
development style, because none of us are going to be putting in 40 hours a
week for a year on this thing.  It will be a labor of love, done in our
spare time, for the most part, and therefore will need to be done in small
chunks.  

We also need to consider our audience.  Is it the MUD community at large?
Is it people writing new MUD engines?  Is it people developing commercial
MUDs who don't want to reinvent the wheel?  I'm thinking it's either the
second or the third.  And a lot of *those* communities are already on the
list.  And we need to consider our ambitions: is the DevMUD (or whatever)
successful if it's used in 2 systems?  20?  200?  2000?  20000?  The
consensus answers to these ought to largely determine the direction
development takes, because it strongly influences many of the fundamental
design choices.

Adam
-- 
adam#princeton,edu 
"There's a border to somewhere waiting, and a tank full of time." - J. Steinman