Thanks for your summary, Grant. I found it very interesting, especially
some of your comments about Augment. Couple of comments and potential
clarifications.
First, Augment source code is available in Augment, and Doug could
potentially start dumping it once he gets going with a2h.pl. I think your
idea of reimplementing L-10 compilers would be a lot of fun, and would
love to see someone do it. (I, myself, would like to give it a go, if
only for historical curiosity. What better way to study a language than
to write a compiler for it?)
Regarding Eric's concerns, I think he had two regarding "local storage,"
and I'm not positive to which you're referring. I'll try to clarify and
respond here; Grant, Eric, or anyone else, feel free to correct me.
Eric has (at least) two concerns that could potentially be categorized as
a "local storage" problem. The first has to do with view control. He
doesn't like the roundtrip latency involved in the current architecture.
I agree with this concern, but I also think that the current architecture
is an important transitional step to start getting users, and that it can
easily be modified to support local handling of views.
The second, which is the one I think Grant is commenting on, has to do
with embedding links in e-mail. Specifically, Eric doesn't like the way
Rod's system embeds links, not text. I agree with Eric on this one, even
though my e-mail system is set up so that I can open up a web browser with
an e-mail link with one click. However, this is really a very minor
problem. The solution is two-fold: include the text as well as the link
for legacy clients, and build an "include content of link" feature into
the OHS client at some point.
Finally, a thought on your comment about open source development.
On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Grant Bowman wrote:
> We talked about scope and how his design was a topology, not an
> implementation plan. Implementation of the parts may be on client,
> server, data layer, global, etc. I am more concerned with a first step,
> any step, to get started. Even if it's in the wrong direction, it would
> be forward movement to work from. IMHO that is what open source
> projects are about. You do what you want and if anyone else wants to
> fork the code, so be it, have at it. One would hope a synergy develops
> solidifying your code line as the base. I think this is how Apache and
> others can work.
I fall in the middle of these two trains of thought. Doug is concerned
about moving in the wrong direction; you're more concerned about not
moving at all. I think that both of these are equivalent evils.
Successful open source development depends heavily on strong initial
design. It's certainly feasible, even highly recommended, to scrap
initial code attempts entirely and rewrite from scratch, but if you start
off with a bad design to begin with, an open source-style methodology is
not going to help you in any way whatsoever.
-Eugene
-- +=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+ | "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they | +===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+
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