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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: RE: XML Technologies: Progress via Simplification or Co mp
 Just taking it as presented. As I said, I know that's not what he meant but that bit gets repeated too often and actually, one should look at it. Duct tape is what we use for broken technologies. (I've spent more of my life on stage than in a computer lab but enough time in both to know where the comparisons fall apart.) The vision of the gleaming technology is older than that. Go back to the thirties and even earlier for the stainless steel buildings, art deco, etc. The Empire State building is still standing. A lot of the ticky tackys of the 50s aren't. Raised floors hide the chaos. Facades hide the boilerplate. A good designer enables upgrades. That is another reason not to duct tape cables. It only works if the setup isn't changed (ever have a drummer show up with a different kit, a new drum, or the bass player and lead guitarist have a fight in the dressing room and now want to be on opposite sides of the stage?) Late bind the moving parts if you can. And yes, that is why scripting is invaluable. The real difference in what we do now and what we did in the 80s is that objects are scripted in a thin client. Interpreters have found their natural and effective role. On the other hand, web clients never come up to the complexity, reliability, and real workflow efficiency of thick clients build with languages that are optimized for the task at hand. Foxpro and its language are a good example of application environments that refuse yield simply because writing a SCAN statement is fast and hard to screw up when compared to looping over a recordset and keeping up with position. It never completely settles down on a new paradigm except where the environment is very very simple. Tim still doesn't understand what information ecosystem concepts really mean. It is all about the predictability of environments and what to do when they no longer are. len From: Adam Turoff [mailto:adam.turoff@g...] > http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource/paradigmshift_0504.html > > Only amateurs and desperate roadies duct tape mic cables. I think you're reading too much into the duct tape metaphor. On the one hand, there's a vision of an precision engineered system where everything is well-designed up front, full of smooth polished chrome and nary a stray line or unasthetically curved surface. It's a vision of the future we had since at least the 1950s. Then there's the hard reality, where things never work as flawlessly as originally designed. This is the where the "duct tape" is visible, and hacking is necessary to make things run in the real world. Then there's the mix of the two approaches. In the real world, you cannot avoid all of the chaos. So instead of ignoring it and dealing with it at the last minute, you can support chaotic behavior by installing raised floors and running all of the cable out of sight. Perl, and the metaphor of the "duct tape of the internet" isn't about amateurish use of immature technology. It's about accepting that shiny gleaming COM/CORBA/SOAP/whatever components never work as flawlessly as originally designed, and more often than not, someone needs to hack on a system to make it work in the real world. 
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