Discussion
I do wonder how practical this would be for a project to do. Like as in, that would be a cool thing to do.
Publish and bind a book of project code.
I mean projects do t-shirts and stuff to fundraise for a project why not a book release for major versions?
@MaddieM4 certainly when teaching folks to code, the act of typing it in and correcting mistakes does engage the brain.
@onepict In a way, I love it. But I've also seen so many O'Reilly books for particular versions of this or that get dumped, eventually. Perhaps it would make more sense to keep a development diary with all the ups and downs and put that into a book. At least the personal stays relevant when the next version is published.
@onepict entirely possible.
Code is text, and that's already written. Text is what basic book typesetting is good at. Most projects have some kind of logo or art that can go on the cover. There are (non-Amazon) options for Print On Demand.
Where it might fall down is the financial side. Would enough people buy an essentially useless novelty book to make it worth doing?
@jetlagjen perhaps Lulu like what Lowtechmagazine does.
@onepict yeah, that's one option.
There's also Draft2Digital, One Bookshelf, Ingram Spark... There are quite a few options these days.
@onepict There's one! (practical only if you are an intimidating polymath, but possible)
@onepict
They have been trying that idea (with interactivity in mind) on Dynamicland for a long time now, here is a small demo of it applied to science.
YouTube
@onepict I've been thinking about this a lot too lately. I think that writing software _with book publishing in mind_ actually ends up putting multiple healthy constraints on the design, which would have prevented quite a few of the wrong turns we took as an industry.
It's not impossible to convert existing software to a more publication-oriented style*, but since a lot of the benefit comes from designing software this way from the ground up, I think it's often more useful for greenfield software that has permacomputing values.
*by which I mean, still more restructuring effort than just formatting an existing software project for print as-is.