Re: who owns the code? was Re: Distinguishing type names from other identifiers

[nabbasi@earthlink.net]

In article <dewar.885398496@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu says...
>
>Paul says
>
>
>  People need to feel a sense of pride in the goods and services they
>  produce in order for them to produce those goods and services to the
>  best of their ability This directly translates into quality.
>
>Absolutely! But this can be a group sense of pride, and in my experience
>the team spirit that comes from this is tremendously valuable. I think
>you will find that people who have worked in this kind of cooperative
>environment have found it very rewarding and productive.
>
>After all, imagine if a sports team were entirely populated by people only
>interested in what *they* could accomplish, as opposed to what the *team*
>working together could accomplish.
>

but even in a sport team, each one is assigned responsibility for one part of
the field,
on a soccer team for example, (this is football for our outside the US viewers) 
you have someone in the center, someone in the front, and a goal keeper etc.. 
you do not see the goal keeper leaving his post and taking position on the 
middle field leaving his post open.  And also you do not have a player 
assigned to the front no willing to kick the ball away from his goal because 
the ball happened to be not in the region of the field he is assigned 
responsibility for.

you really can have people working together towards one thing and have 
individual responsibility and the healthy ownership that comes with it at the
same time.

>One obvious disadvantage of the ownership model is that it makes it hard
>to transfer things around. If you feel you own a piece of the system, then
>you are not going to be happy turning it over to someone else, even if
>such a transfer of responsbilities makes good sense from a team point of
>view.
>

Sure, I agree, but it is a normal human feeling for someone not to want to 
let go of something they have put allot of effort and improvement on. if 
you take care of your home, make improvements on it for long time, you 
become attached to it, and selling it will be hard even if it is what needs to
be done.

But the solution to this problem is NOT to prevent people from owning their own 
homes and instead have everyone live in community housing owned by 
the government, where it will then be easier to have people be moved 
from one part to another without having to worry about them having
developed any attachment to the place they "owned".

>I realize that many, perhaps most, engineers reading this list simply
>don't have the experience of working as part of a unified team. Too bad!
>

I can;t answer this one, since I have not asked every programmer reading
this how they feel about this issue. But I would like to think that 
many programmers like to help each others and work in a team and 
still being given their own tasks they can work on and they feel 
they are resposible for, even if it is a very small part of the 
the overall project.

Nasser