On Nov 6, 2004, at 5:46 AM, Thorsten Ottosen wrote:
Dear all,
Following our discussion of the unicode library, would it not be a good idea to persue such efforts more aggresively?
I could imagine it would help bring forward libraries much faster. I think it would be reasonable that the boost comunity provided
1. project descriptions
This is a good idea regardless of whether we are going to ask universities to write some Boost libraries. We often discuss potential libraries on the mailing list that never come into existence, but someone picks up later on and would greatly benefit from a recount of what was discussed in the form of a project description.
2. help and guidelines throughout the 6-12 months of the project
Again, this is useful for anyone bringing their first library up for review. Granted, it's probably more important in the academic setting (an outside contact person).
If we had small papers explaining potential projects, these can be sent to universities which can the in turn suggest them to their students. [snip] Any thoughts?
Well, I have a few comments. The Graph library has benefited greatly from student projects from Generic Programming classes at various universities (the isomorphism, Floyd-Warshall, and A* search algorithms are examples of this), so it can work. Additionally, several good libraries have come from universities. So the work of students at universities can be very good, of course. On the other hand, the motivations of universities and especially students writing thesis projects is very, very different from the motivations of the average Boost developer. The emphasis is on minimizing development time and writing papers about the result (new algorithms, new data structures, etc.), not on creating and maintaining high-quality software. So, here is my intended point: Unless there is a shift in perception so that creating and maintaining a Boost library (or software in general) provides the same academic benefit (as a conference paper or journal article would), the motivations of universities won't line up with the motivations of the Boost community, so I don't see much benefit in soliciting libraries. Smaller bits of functionality (graph or string algorithms, for instance) might be better-suited for class projects, although they would be too small for thesis projects. Interested individuals, whether in academia or industry, will still be able to find Boost regardless. Doug