[Bf-committers] Sum up the long outside viewers post

bf-committers@blender.org bf-committers@blender.org
Thu, 13 May 2004 11:31:51 -0500


On 13 May 2004 at 16:35, Alexander Ewering wrote:

> 
> Perhaps I should be more elaborate:
> 
> This is clearly a bad excuse. (Woohoo!)
> 
> It seems to be a matter of taste. I personally had no problems
> with the Blender source code. From the first glance at it to my
> first finished project (Audio sequencer stuff) took me about 2
> days. I'm not saying that I'm necessarily a genius, but I guess
> it depends on how much effort you want to spend on a project, and
> how much it represents your own style of doing things.
> 
> Re-coding or "re-implementing" half of the Blender code base
> to make it "more attractive to [coding] newbies" is just as
> pointless (in my opinion) as making the UI more newbie-friendly.
> 
> Blender's code is not for first-day "Hello World\n" coders.
> 
> (That doesn't necessarily imply that you are one, it's just
> a generic statement).
>

I am not talking about making it more Newbie Friendly. I'm talking 
about making it new Blender Coder Friendly. Now let me elaborate a 
little. Blender is open source now. That means it depends on people 
from many different areas coming together to make it work. Fragmented 
code is not good code. Proprietary software may be able to get away 
with it because the guy who wrote that particular piece of cryptic 
code or that Monster 1500 line function is just down the hall or at 
the least a phone call away. This is not necessarily true for open 
source projects. I too added my first feature to blender in just 
under one day. But when I started to dig into some of the deeper 
parts of blender I noticed something. there are parts of blender 
where if you change one thing you have to edit 100's of other 
functions to make it work. (ok i'm exaggerating its more like ten's)

And the only way to know about some of them is to compile and test. 
this should not be the case on an open source project. I'm pretty 
sure the Blender Foundation wants Blender to succeed. Part of that 
equation in the long term is making the CodeBase Open Source 
friendly.