Re: [Maypole] (no subject)

From: Simon Cozens (simon at simon-cozens.org)
Date: Fri Nov 19 2004 - 15:46:39 GMT


David R. Baird:
> My POV is that Maypole is still young, and stability of the
> interface, although nice, is still secondary to making things (even)
> better.

Let me begin with an apology. I don't want to continually be the Ghost of
Maintainers Past who comes to the list occasionally to point a finger at the
current way of doing things. Simon F, please don't consider what I'm saying
here in any way binding. It's an indication of what I'd like to see, but I'm
just a user now, albeit one who's probably created a lot more Maypole sites
than most of you, and I'm happy to be outvoted. I just want to explain how
the design was supposed to go.

I'm not convinced that you make Maypole better by adding more classes.

I'm not convinced you make any code better by adding more classes. C++ is
thataway.

Every time you add another concept to the core, you increase complexity. It
may look like abstraction, but it isn't. You weren't using the request object
for anything else anyway, so you're not really abstracting anything. It's
merely added complexity. And every time you increase the core complexity of
Maypole, God kills a kitten. Make peripheral modules as complex as you like -
Maypole's designed to allow you to do that. But keep the core small. Then you
don't have to maintain it.

The core principle of using Maypole is that if you find yourself doing a lot
of work, you've done something wrong. The same goes for maintaining its
implementation. I understand that every new maintainer wants to paint the
bikeshed their favourite colour and needs to make their mark. Fine. I have a
version of Maypole on my disk that does what *I* want in case things get too
wacky out there.

But what I'm (not so) secretly hoping is that when Maypole gets cleaned up for
a new release and the core implementation is polished a little and people
WRITE LOTS OF APPLICATIONS IN IT BEFORE HACKING IT TO PIECES, we'll discover
that the separation of concerns you're talking about really isn't that
important, when it comes down to it.

-- 
<Masque> It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
<purl> Then it's a sport!

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