GetIt alternatives

[Jonah Jeleniewski 16]

58 minutes ago, Vincent Parrett said:

I found it odd that it's written in Go and not Delphi.  

Huh. People seem to get fixated on this detail a lot.

I'm not sure why it would matter if the tooling for your language isn't written in that language, though.

 

I don't care if my package manager is written in Emojicode - when it comes to tooling, all that really matters is the developer experience using it.

[Vincent Parrett 750]

Just now, Jonah Jeleniewski said:

I don't care if my package manager is written in Emojicode - when it comes to tooling, all that really matters is the developer experience using it.

I care about whether the community can contribute to it or not. The number of delphi developers who consume open source projects AND are willing to contribute to those projects is very small - when you filter those developers who have Go skills the the number would be vanishingly small. 

 

For me though the issue with Boss is the complete lack of discoverability - you have to know a package exists to be able to use it, how do I find the available packages for Boss? With dpm and other package managers that have a public repository (eg. nuget, npm, cargo) that is easy - and dpm presents that list of available packages in the IDE (searchable). 

[Jonah Jeleniewski 16]

26 minutes ago, Vincent Parrett said:

I care about whether the community can contribute to it or not. The number of delphi developers who consume open source projects AND are willing to contribute to those projects is very small - when you filter those developers who have Go skills the the number would be vanishingly small. 

Aw, that's a bit joyless. We're all developers here, right? Picking up new skills and languages is part of the fun.

 

26 minutes ago, Vincent Parrett said:

For me though the issue with Boss is the complete lack of discoverability - you have to know a package exists to be able to use it, how do I find the available packages for Boss? With dpm and other package managers that have a public repository (eg. nuget, npm, cargo) that is easy - and dpm presents that list of available packages in the IDE (searchable). 

Seems like a fair critique, and I really like the discoverability aspect of DPM. 👍

[Vincent Parrett 750]

28 minutes ago, Jonah Jeleniewski said:

Aw, that's a bit joyless. We're all developers here, right? Picking up new skills and languages is part of the fun.

Sure, I do that all the time - but tinkering with something and being good at something are not the same. It's not just the language you need to learn, it's the libraries. I can read and write code in Go, Rust, C, C++, Javascript, Typescript, C#, Delphi - but I would only consider myself good at writing the last 3 (I have used a bunch more languages over the years too).  

 

What you are forgetting is just how little time most people have to dedicate to open source development - if you look at the most popular open source delphi projects, you will see they have only a hand full of regular contributors. If you add having to learn a new language (whatever that may be)  then you are narrowing the pool of possible contributors substantially.

 

Examples

 

https://github.com/VSoftTechnologies/DUnitX/graphs/contributors - 56 contributors but only one regular one (the author - myself).

 

https://github.com/danieleteti/delphimvcframework/graphs/contributors 42 contributors but only one regular one (the author).

 

https://bitbucket.org/sglienke/spring4d/src/master/ - bitbucket doesn't show the number of contributors but the 99% of the commits come from one person ( the maintainer/new author). 

 

Most other contributors contribute the odd bug fix but they tend to be one offs. If they have to learn another language (or are not good at a language) then they either won't contribute or they will move on to an alternative. 

 

So yes, being an open source author can be somewhat joyless.