[thelist] [OT] Gift Culture on the Net: A Rant

[Frank]

>  Let me guess, cold fusion tags? One thing that has
>  always struck a difference with me between exclusive CF
>  developers and exclusive perl/php/(at times)java
>  programmers is the willingness of the perl/php/java
>  people to allow others to learn from their code.

A funny thing happened on the way to my career as a web developer...

In the early beginnings (that would be before Cold Fusion and ASP) 
there was an obscure, cryptic, mysterious language called PERL, and I 
had to learn it. I was to provide a high-tech 'solution'. Yep! I had 
to write a form re-mailer.

After having looked at all of the 7 or 8 or so of re-mailers that 
existed then, I ran into to one that was different than most. I had 
no idea what the code was about, but the comments read like a story. 
Line after line of carefully chosen words helped me understand what 
these mysterious symbols meant. I studied this document over and over 
for nearly three weeks. And in that time, I barely learned a thing 
about PERL, other than how to hack someone else's scripts.

What I learned however was that on the net, no one is alone. I 
learned that by choosing my words well, that I could help other's 
make sense of my work. I learned the principles of *thinking* as a 
programmer. I learned that coding could actually be fun, and wasn't 
necessarily a dark, horrible thing that only the greatest genius 
could do (although I'm not always convinced on this last point). I 
learned self-confidence; I could learn to understand and possibly 
even one day master technology.

Ever since having read that script, I had made two promises to 
myself: the first was that I would some day write code just like 
that, and the second was that I would give it away, so that someone 
in the same position would have the same chance.

Anyone ever see the movie "Pay it Forward"? Works for me.

-- 

Where there's a will, there's a way.

Frank Marion                      Loofah Communications
frank at loofahcom.com               http://www.loofahcom.com