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Re: should GOOPS be built-in?


Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@mdj.nada.kth.se> writes:

> Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net> writes:
> 
> > Michael Vanier <mvanier@bbb.caltech.edu> writes:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Are you advocating that no changes to the guile core be accepted unless
> > > they're accompanied by documentation?  That would be an interesting idea,
> > > but I'm not sure the guile world is ready for it...
> > 
> > No big changes, at any rate.
> 
> My impression is that the Guile community in general is rather weak
> when it comes to actually writing code.  Now, you may argue that this
> is because of the lack of documentation, but that may not be the whole
> truth.

Actually, I think there are a variety of reasons for
this. Documentation is one, but you're right that it's not necessarily
the biggest one.

Guile is like most other projects out there, in that the people
involved can be separated into two categories: people who do stuff,
and people who say stuff. Now, ordinarily this forms something of a
symbiotic relationship: the people who do stuff can pay attention to
the people who say stuff when the stuff they say is smart, making the
stuff that's done better; or they can make fun of the people who say
stuff when the stuff they say is stupid, which provides an outlet if
you're stressed out after doing stuff; stuff is still getting done,
and people who like to say stuff have a lot of stuff to say stuff
about.

In guile's case, though, there are some fairly serious problems (and
not because there are more people who just like to say stuff... there
are *always* more people who just like to say stuff):

One is that doing stuff has often been an exercise in futility. People
do stuff. The stuff is totally ignored. People no longer feel like
doing stuff, and go off to hack at the linux kernel, where at least
there's the chance of getting in on the next big IPO.

Second is that the people who say stuff aren't particularly willing to
try the stuff of the people doing stuff, so the stuff that's done
isn't always high quality. People doing stuff become tired of feeling
like the boy in the bubble; at least he had a deck of cards (note:
can anybody tell me where that came from?)

Third is related to documentation: it's hard to do stuff when you
don't know how other stuff works. There are possibly more people who'd
do stuff if they didn't have to dedicate so much time to discovering
other stuff; unfortunately, to do this currently, you often have to
get the people doing stuff to say a lot of stuff, which means that
stuff isn't done.

The overall result is that very little stuff is done, and,
increasingly, less and less stuff is being said, because it's only fun
to say stuff when there's stuff to say stuff about. 

-- 
Greg: to get the original version, s/stuff/shit/g

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