But - who's going to decide? Volunteers. People who get together to create a fine product, mostly on their own time. Everyone is invited to participate, and as chromatic explained, even novices such as I can help out by learning more and asking questions - maybe suggesting features, or identifying unclear syntax, whatever. No one has tried to coerce me into using Perl 6, reading about it, or contributing.

I remain of the opinion that the requirements analysis stage should be completed before the implementation phases. If you don't know what you're building, you don't know if what you've built is good, bad, or indifferent.

I think it's exciting to find a bunch of people who are doing something - something very difficult - just for the satisfaction of doing a job well done.

I don't. A "job well done" is the principle reason why an adult does anything: if it's not worth doing right, why is it worth doing at all? That's basic, obvious ethics where I come from: I don't know where or how you were raised. If the end product is worth it, you work as hard as it takes, you follow your plan, and you get the results you promised. If it's not worth it, you don't bother starting in the first place.

All the objective analysis, design, etc. aren't going to do squat unless people are motivated to do the hard work involved - and that takes dreaming, emotions, a feeling that this is worthwhile and meaningful.

Motivating young children requires often dreams, feelings, and other emotional coercions: motivating adults requires only that you present a rational argument that shows that the benefits of a project outweight the costs.

If your argument is rational, and fits with the individuals values and skillsets, they will be persuaded, as a mature, rational adults are. Alternatively, they're not a mature, rational adult, you don't want them on your team anyway.

The entire world is not composed of children. Assuming that wheedling, pleading, and cajoling is a mature way to win support is not going to get you the quality of volunteers that a solid plan and good design documents will.

In reply to Re^5: No, "We" Don't Have to Do Anything by Anonymous Monk
in thread No, "We" Don't Have to Do Anything by chromatic

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.