I was doing a workshop last weekend and while I was showing my work I discovered that two of the pieces in my portfolio are just... dead links. both pieces were made on commission for organizations that no longer exist, and I was reminded of the fact that if you want something on the internet to last you have to host it yourself.
(this is why I'm a mastodon fan. not that I'm hosting my own account right now, but it's good to know that I could!)
I teach tech and I'm often asked why I don't teach some allegedly time-saving proprietary tool/environment/whatever. the answer is that the risk of that proprietary tool just ceasing to exist are really high, and when that happens, the time I spend developing curricula against the tool goes up in smoke. by contrast, notes I wrote for, e.g., python text processing are just as good today as they were ten years ago. over the long run, I think I save a lot of time by teaching only open source tools.
@aparrish Also, time-saving tools are just that. Time-saving. If you understand the underlying principle you can understand why toolY is helping save time.
As a student it has always been very important for me to understand the why of the what. If I don't have the why (even a vague idea) I cannot learn the what.
@aparrish It's interesting to see how easy it is to fall into believing that the tools are at the heart of what we do, and to forget that learning overarching concepts will leave us in a much stronger position than learning the steps to accomplish tasks in a single language. I suspect that the neoliberal mentality of schools as worker prep has a lot to do with this.
@mattlaschneider I agree about the neoliberal mentality! but it's a difficult balancing act. one of the things I actually love about teaching is threading the needle just right so that students get the foundational knowledge they need but also feel like they can make cool things with what I'm teaching as soon as possible. (I teach in an art program and there is *very* little patience for boring fundamentals :sunglasses:)
@aparrish this! all the typical CS nonsense (fibonacci etc) is a super easy way to lose students immediately @mattlaschneider
@aparrish fun fact: this mentality is so pervasive that back in 2012 a member of our *conservative* government called businesses out for it, telling them that they needed to start pulling their own weight on the employee education front.
@aparrish This is super real. I also do this with vendors contacting me trying to sell me shit: "is your product open source and are you selling support for it? no? then we're not interested."
@aparrish i agree but i don't want to be too self congratulatory about how we never lose the ability to run 20 year old software. I have plenty of 15 year old python programs that don't run due to minor compatibility problems. It's likely that in 10 years hardly anybody will run this weird old X11 thing and a million applications will not be easy to run anymore etc. Being Free software didn't help a "mere user" run treasured software after the community moves on and it breaks.
@jepler oh I absolutely agree—open source software and architecture is also subject to bitrot. but the projects in question were both less than two years old (!). it's always going to be a shitshow for "mere users" but I think especially in the high-churn world of contemporary tech culture, it's important for artists and makers to control the platforms that host their work.
@aparrish This is a big consideration for us - astronomers tend to use the same packages for decades as languages and fads come and go - we often re-analyse old data, too, so stable data standards help. There's a big cost to redeveloping your entire system every few years.
@planet4589 @aparrish For sure. I've been at my work long enough to see so many computing fads rise and fall. At the end of the day, though, the core tool chain we learned 20-some years ago is still alive, relevant, and a stable foundation for everything we have built since. Thanks, Unix and open-source friends!
("only" there should come with an asterisk, I don't make a categorical exclusion, especially when teaching for a narrow audience. but "only open source" is my guiding principle)