Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Tony Smith <tony AT smee.org>]

On Friday 10 October 2003 10:12 am, Seth Woolley wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Tony Smith wrote:
> > On Thursday 09 October 2003 11:59 pm, Paul Mahon wrote:
> > > No, Python is soo amaturish. We should use Java and change the
> > > simpleinit scripts to XML.
> >
> > Now you're just trolling ;-) but in case you mean it I'll bite:
>
> He was.

Phew :-)

> > 1. Python is ugly, but it's not amaturish. Java on the other hand has
> > some fundamental issues that I certainly do consider amaturish: filename
> > must equal class name is the big one. That causes huge headaches for
> > developers  - because renaming a class means renaming the file. That's OK
> > when you're on your own but in a team it's tough because renames are much
> > harder than normal edits to merge.
> >
> > Ruby is far cleaner than both Python and Java.
>
> I would probably agree if I knew Ruby from what I hear.  I come from
> Java-land myself, so that gives me even more reason to agree.

:-) I converted about a year ago now and one thing that continually amazes me 
about Ruby is the number of times my scripts work first time - I mean no 
syntax errors and no bugs (well no obvious ones anyway!). It happens to me 
with about 1in 6 scripts that I write - a much better ratio than I ever 
achieved with Perl or Python.

> > 2. Simpleinit is _simple_, XML is anything but. I'll stick with
> > simpleinit thanks. IMHO, XML has one great use-case (apart from HTML) and
> > that is data-exchange. Everywhere else I've seen it used something
> > simpler would have been better.
>
> XML is used outside of data-exchange?  Did I miss something, because I
> thought thats _all_ XML is (a data-exchange (read: markup) standard with
> its extensibility highly defined).

You missed a lot - unfortunately (I certainly wish that was true)

> Maybe you mean it's a bad idea to put scripts in XML format (as CDATA
> in some element, I guess) as it gets messy -- XML if it were used would
> probably just have standard bash encapsulated within it (or java, whatever
> he's using).  That would just be treating the real scripts as data.

Yes, that's definitely a bad idea, but also people are putting files in /etc 
in XML format: scrollkeeper is an example. And that is a really bad idea - it 
always sounds nice in theory but it makes it really really hard to diagnose 
problems. I may be a luddite but to my mind everything in /etc should be easy 
to read and I shouldn't need anything more sophisticated than vi to modify 
it.

The crux of the matter seems to be that people are learning XML at college 
and 
having done so, they start looking about for a place to use it so it becomes 
a solution looking for a problem. If they started with the problem and looked 
for the best solution I bet XML wouldn't be a common answer.

Tony