Community

After last month’s SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, you told us that you wanted to hear more about the projects and from the developers. We put out a call on Twitter for your questions, and sent them to each winner.

Our first response comes from Max Horn, a.k.a. Fingolfin, ScummVM project lead. ScummVM won the Best Project for Gamers category.

What made you choose to make your project open source?

I joined the project after it was created, so I can’t give a definite answer to that one, but I think the original motivation to write ScummVM was to have fun reverse-engineering the games, to be able to play them again, and to let others share the fun. In retrospect, going open source was important because it allowed lots of people to help out — by improving the existing code, adding new engines, and porting ScummVM to new devices.
I don’t think ScummVM could have gone where it is now as a closed source app.

What does your development environment (OS, IDE, etc.) look like?

Mac OS X 10.5 running on a MacBook Pro. No IDE — I use BBEdit as my editor (and have been doing so for a decade now or so), and Terminal.app to compile code, together with gdb for debugging. I keep trying out XCode and Eclipse, but always very quickly go back to the editor+make+gdb combination, because those IDEs are all so terribly slow. Whenever I get a new machine, I try it again, hoping that now it will be fast enough, but it seems IDE producers compensate for faster CPUs by adding more bloat.

How long did it take you to develop your project and how many people contributed to it?

ScummVM was started in 2001, so people have been working on it for about eight years. During this time, we have had patches from several hundred people. Of these, maybe 70-80 made bigger contributions. In 2009 so far, a bit more than 40 people made commits on our project.

How many open source projects have you worked on? What is your favorite?

I have submitted patches to dozens of projects (including some I keep forgetting about; sometimes I am surprised to find my name in “thank you” lists). But serious contributions — maybe 6-8? My all-time favorite is ScummVM, but I enjoyed working on all of them. And there are some projects I really would like to get my fingers on, but unfortunately, days still have only 24 hours. Hopefully they’ll fix that eventually ;).

One of the first things people new to the world of programming want to know is what language they ought to learn first. It’s a great question and, as you can imagine, there are dozens of answers. When schism61 asked that very thing a few months ago, more than 200 community members leapt in to answer and here’s what some of them had to say:

Silverfang is a Python fan because it’s “a new open source language that influences good coding practices which is great for new programmers,” while Awsdcom suggested starting with php to because it’s one of the most common Web programming languages and fairly easy to learn.

Ross Turk, SourceForge’s director of community, says both are fine languages and, in fact, the SourceForge.net Web site was written in php. At then end of the day, though, Turk says Python is probably the way to go. “Python forces good coding standards on you. You kind of don’t have a choice in the matter. It’s also one of the purer object-oriented languages, so bits and pieces of what you learn with Python will also apply to Java and C++. On the flip side, python is also somewhat uncommon when compared to PHP, Perl, C, and Java.

“I personally started with BASIC a billion years ago, then Logo. But they sort of don’t count.” Turk goes on to say, “My first modern language was Perl, then PHP, then bits and pieces of Java, C, and Python. If I could do it all over again, I would have tried to learn C first…but that’s certainly not the easiest way to do it.”

Community member Ross Drew chimed in with some unexpected advice — new programmers should start with Pascal. He says it “enforces good programming style because it’s not immediately flexible. Its easy to pick up Pascal and once you get the hang of records and pointers, you have a good understanding of how the computer sees code.”

Conhed takes a broader approach to the question and says the first language an inexperienced programmer should learn ought to be based on what they want to do with it in the long-term. If the goal is just to solve or address a specific problem, then the best language is one that’s targeted at the individual issue.

“If you want to learn programming, but don’t have a specific problem to solve,” says Conhed, “then you should pick a newer high level object oriented language with strong enforcement of good coding practices. I would recommend Python as it is easy to start with and learn the basics. It pretty much requires good technique, and as a bonus, is very powerful and the extensibility is limited only by your imagination.”

Many community members say the best open source developers have a whole toolkit of programming options to choose from: Java, C, C++, Perl, and so on. They suggest new programmers simply pick a language, get proficient at it, then move on to learn a new one.

What are your thoughts? What programming language would you recommend to new developers? Let me know in the comments.