RE: Licences

Brent Fulgham wrote:

> --- Anton van Straaten <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > BTW, another point for the FAQ will be "how come the
> > site doesn't run 100% Scheme"?  I'd like to have a
> > good answer to that written up so that I don't
> > have to feel guilty every time I suggest something
> > that isn't Scheme.  ;)
>
> It's a valid point.  I've forgotten the answer :-)

It's the same reason the Erlang Cookbook isn't written in Erlang!  ;oP

> I imagine something about "not reinventing the wheel"
> might be in order.

Yes.  There are a huge number of grungy real-world details that the popular
open/free packages have long since dealt with.  If the primary goal is to
actually make a workable Cookbook available, the main effect of having it in
Scheme would be a great deal more work for the people doing it, IMO.  If
anyone wanted to prove I'm a wimp and just do it, I'd love it, and would
help any way I could.  But I think a non-trivial development effort is
involved.

The voting idea is a perfect example: does anyone want to write that in
Scheme?  Given a choice between writing it from scratch, and plugging in an
off-the-shelf solution, I'd choose the latter every time, since I have no
good reason to care about implementing the functionality myself, and I
expect it would take an order of magnitude or two longer to do that.

> But with the PLT server and Moshi
> available... I'm not sure it holds as much water. :-\

Some of the things Moshi didn't have were revision control, user
authentication, a mechanism for associating forms and their data with pages,
or a high-level way (other than Scheme code) of producing views based on the
page metadata.  Other than the Scheme source code formatting, IIRC the
current Cookbook involves no custom code - it's all based on TWiki queries.
I know that this could all be implemented very elegantly with Scheme, but it
also would have taken much more time.  We'd also be taking on the ongoing
maintenance of that code.

Plus, don't forget that all Scheme source code in the Cookbook is being
formatted by a Scheme servlet running on the PLT server (see
Sandbox.ScmToXexpr).  Over time, more functionality could be migrated to
Scheme, especially if the actual functionality of the Cookbook is being
upgraded.  In fact, I had originally talked about implementing the
generation of chapter and contents pages in Scheme (see AdminCookbookViews),
and even begun implementing it, when I realized how easy it would be to use
forms and queries on form data to do that.

If you like, the current Cookbook could be considered just a messy prototype
for a more sophisticated (and better-performing!) Scheme version.  Now it's
merely a question of when the real thing is going to be implemented, and by
whom.  :)

Anton



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