That's quite egotistical of you, assuming that just because
they are students, they do not have the sophistication to
develop on the level of the Alice team.
Fact is, those youngsters probably have an easier time
grasping development concepts than you or I do.
I have been using PHP for several years now, and
I get quite tired of some boob behind a desk telling
me that I don't know how to write programs because I
didn't take a class, or I don't have experience because
I didn't get paid. Pp-lease!
Fact is, if Alice is as complex as you claim with so little documentation, (not commented in the source), it tells
me that the people who developed Alice to begin with
aren't very good ad writing programs.
I'm speaking out of experience here. I developed
a PHP CMS
program and now that I want to update
the program I have to sort through all the code
and figure out what I did because I was to lazy
to comment on what the code does.
While no one else will see this code, it just goes
to show you that proper documentation is a big
part of programming. Especially when the code
becomes complex.
If the Alice team did not take the time to properly
document their
code, then I am of the opinion
that these students are more suited for the job
than the Alice team.
I am now taking a Java class and have two advantages
over many of the students in my class. The experience
I have with
PHP enables me to understand many of the
concepts, while my not having commented code in my
previous work gives me a greater motivation to ensure
that I do.
Documentation is essential to any programming project.
To claim a project is open source and yet does not have
enough documentation to enable others outside the
inner circle to contribute, is in of itself an oxymoron.
I had thought about contributing to this project myself.
But now I see that Alice is a waste of my time.
Thank you for clarifying the Alice teams view on
contributors.
That's all I have to say about that.