Re: Its a bird, its a plane, its.. um, an Attribute based System?

Not to feed the troll, and I realize I'm late to this thread, but...

On Thursday 01 April 2010 07:20:07 pm thunk wrote:
> absolute last word from me forever on this as things are....

Probably a good thing.

I have to admit, I'm disappointed. I'd hoped maybe you'd be able to give us an 
idea, at some point, of what you're talking about.

> my lessons:
> 
> 1.  While the TOPIC still seems appropriate to a Ruby Discussions
> group, the Medium is not "conducive" to communicating on a bigger
> project.

Actually, it is, if you're capable of communicating WTF that bigger project 
is.

> 2. I have developed my own (tarzan) vocabulary to deal with a non-
> trivial problem based on what I have seen that seems to fit best,
> without reading about this or having anybody to chat about.

Having your own vocabulary can make things difficult if you're using terms 
that already have established meanings.

That said, I'm not sure that was the main issue. The main issue is that you 
not only concocted your own whole new vocabulary, but you were unable to 
define pretty much any term you were using in plain English, or in plain Ruby, 
or in any terms we would understand.

> 3. Using phrases that mean other things to people that are in
> authority is not a good way to start any conversation,

I don't know that there's any particular authority in control of this forum. 
What authority there is seems to be meritocratic -- that is, I listen to 
certain people because I know what they've done, and I know they can be 
respected. When the guy who wrote Merb (and Nanite, and a bunch of other fun 
things) tells you he doesn't know what you're talking about, I'm inclined to 
believe it's that you have a problem communicating, and not that we have a 
problem understanding.

> 4.I have NO idea what a "troll" is in your context, you have no idea
> what I'm tryng to say by "black box" in mine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)

> 5. Setting up a wiki at GitHub is many times less painless than I
> thought, I really should have done that FIRST - but in my defense I
> had no idea what I was going to learn here.

That doesn't really help. The homepage of your wiki does almost nothing to 
explain what you're talking about. In particular:

"Ru’ids are the “Atomic Unit” in this 100% pure Ruby based system.
They are not the only part, but they are rather the defining part."

Unit of what, what does that imply, what do they actually do? You don't do a 
very good job of defining them. For that, I have to go to another page:

"They are Minimum Program Units written in a set of
simple Ruby DSLs."

Minimum Program Units -- so, what, methods, modules, objects, files?
Telling us that it's a DSL doesn't help unless you tell us what that DSL is 
describing.

For example, Rake has tasks. They are defined in a DSL, sure, but what's 
important is that they're a block of code with a name and a list of other 
tasks they depend on.

> I bought a
> Book on Symphony that was written by the author that must have been
> 200 pages, I'm not sure that what has to happen to accomplish what I
> know I have accomplished will not require any less....  perhaps
> more....

Definitely less, if you hope for any of us to read it.

It's not just that we have limited time and patience, it's that you are making 
less sense the more you write, and you STILL don't have a proper summary of 
what it is you're talking about.

> 7.  Open source has an attitude of "show me your source" and any
> situation that does not fit this mold can become one of suspicion.

Somewhat, but not necessarily.

For example, I've occasionally brought up my somewhat abstract idea of a pure-
Ruby actor library in which the messages sent between actors are just method 
calls, and actors can be garbage-collected. I sort of have a prototype, but 
I've never shared it here.

Yet people were willing to talk to me about it, because I'm able to explain it 
in terms they can understand. The only thing missing might be a description of 
the actor model, and I can just point them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model

The reason people are insisting that you show us the code is that you seem 
utterly incapable of saying what you mean in plain English, so there's the 
hope that maybe, if there's something to it, we'll be able to understand your 
code. I have my doubts about that -- it might be that people were hoping you'd 
shut up and go make it work.

> 8 forum "politics" is not new to me, but the system of "Rank" here
> seems less fragmented than I had expected. Human swarms are always
> interesting.  Mr Davis used exactly the timing, and exactly decisive
> manner that I would use to shut down a "young turk" if I was in a
> position of authority.  (Breaking of rank at this point would take
> some balls.)

I'm fairly sure I've disagreed with Mr. Davis on occasion. I've certainly 
"broken rank" with anyone here who could be considered a "leader". There are 
all sorts of lively debates, and politics generally doesn't get in the way.

The problem here is not politics, it is the fact that no one, even quiet 
lurkers like me, is able to figure out what you're talking about. If someone 
could, I'd hope they would speak up and translate for the rest of us.