You know, I have to comment on a trend I've been seeing recently. Now that I have subscribed to various blog aggregators, I'm being exposed to a higher volume of developers (and their work) than I would normally. As a result of this, I'm surprised to find developers that are calling other people's work their own, either directly or implicitly.
Case in point: I just found a blog post from a CF developer who created an online presentation discussing design patterns, and how to implement them. I paged through the presentation, which I found contained examples that bore a striking resemblance to the Decorator Pattern chapter in Head First Design Patterns. The book's first example? A Duck domain object. Surprisingly, the same in the presentation. The second example: A Coffee domain object, oddly enough, second in the presentation. The textbook uses a Pizza domain object as the third example. Take a guess at what the third example in the presentation is.
I'm more inclined to let it slide when someone adapts what was written in the text more closely to the language they are working with, which in turn acts as an instructional tool for junior developers of that language. As it turns out, this is what another CF developer did (and a fairly well-recognized one, to boot), and their "article" remains online at the ColdFusion Developer's Journal site to this day. I appreciate the work that went into it, and I'm glad that it served as a CF-based decorator lesson, but c'mon...was it you "really standing in line at your local coffee shop" that inspired your Coffee-themed decorator article? Or was it more likely that you also picked up a copy of Head First Design Patterns (which, coincidentally, was published and hit the shelves four months before your article). Pretty surprising coincidence, considering the examples of "options" and "syrups" used in both.
I can almost hear the naysayers now: Cut these people a break. You can only customize coffee so many ways. It isn't surprising at all that these programming examples bear similar attributes.
That sound you hear is me rolling my eyes.
Why is it so hard for people to give credit to the material that taught them in the first place? Is it that important that you have to try to have your knowledge stand on its own? Does it make you more credible when you don't cite your sources, and thus, act like you knew this information all along? Wouldn't it make sense that, once your article was found to be a near-copy of something already published, you would have less credibility than before?
I feel bad for the original authors, honestly, whose work it was is now being billed as someone else's. It's my opinion that, if you want to use someone else's work, you should either come up with your own specific examples that apply the same knowledge, or at least make a reference to the information that taught you in the first place.
The presentation I mentioned at the start of this post ends with a classic "Any Questions?" slide. Yeah, I have a question:
What part of the presentation were you planning on citing the sources pulled from that O'Reilly text?
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