alt Hacker NewsThis is nicely written, and the style is fresh after a year of reading LLM writing whenever I click.
Interesting to me is the audience - this article is appropriate for a middle schooler on up to read, and assumes no technical knowledge at all, or very little. Documentation targets and the social culture around them have varied since I started reading documents like these, but this sets an especially low bar for reader knowledge.
I like it. On the one hand, I could have gotten much more technical detail out of a version that used industry-specific words and was half the length, but on the other, I got what i needed, and learned much about the author to boot.
Replies
2003 was a completely different era for technical detail. That kind of detail normally only sat in corporations.
People would jump in, contribute their part, write a bit and leave. Folk were willing to contribute ideas to your project and assist in parts you got stuck. You learnt and understood by studying the source you were given or obtained. There were less expectations, if you had a half-baked thing folk gave you grave .
Code was more optimistic, fun and free for all. You didn't get lynched for not having a license or for not using $LANG. You grabbed something from Sourceforge and ran with it.
Why are you not using Python!? Why are you coding in TCL. PHP, pathetic. eww, you use IRC? lol perl.
Forums were rampant, the internet was a friendly place; LAN parties were awesome and the internet had rainbow coloured fences not grey greased walls like now were climbing over are a struggle requiring you to leave with one or the other. The world wasn't as depressed and a new phone was a new phone and not just a rehashed Android UI.
Where did we go wrong is an answer that cannot be answered other than we seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over again blaming whoever.
Granted I was 15, so naivety. Thirty Seven this year and still waiting for someone to code the time machine to relive those days.
/me goes and scours sourceforge
It also impressed me, as I'm not sure I'd have that sort of dogged patience. Samba is one of those incredibly useful pieces of open source software that sometimes I feel I take for granted.
I won't take it for granted now.
As a side note, the documentation has been pretty darn good too. I set up an AD server in Samba just from the docs, with a bit of additional help from Stack Overflow. It was only after I had finished that I determined that I could do what I needed with just the basic Samba user/groups. (My needs were not complicated enough to justify the extra overhead of AD.)