* sawyer x <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-07-01 08:10]: > > personally I find ::Easy and ::Simple no more useful than > > ::Foo. It says absolutely nothing about what kind of ease or > > simplicity I can expect, and CPAN has plenty of examples of > > such modules exhibiting all possible interpretations of these > > words. > > > > (XML::Simple comes to mind here, which has an API so complex > > at this point (with its own strict mode!) that the name is > > almost comical.) > > This just screams to me like we need to have better standards > than canceling out words English language that can be used to > mean something. Instead of ruling out the words Easy, Tiny, > Simple, Fast, and any other word, we need to have better > standards to make sure these words are still meaningful to us. > > It'd be easier to have a new module up called Log::Fast and > have it take 30 minutes to actually log something, thus ruining > he idea of ::Fast, but it'd be more worthwhile changing its > name to Log::FsckingSlow and not ruin ::Fast. And it would be > even better to just do it right altogether and make Log::Fast > justifiable.
You utterly missed the point, though arguably I made it in a misleading way. I did *not* say that XML::Simple isn’t simple. The point is that “simple” in “XML::Simple” means “parses XML documents into plain Perl data structures” rather than “has a simple API” or “consists of simple code” or some other kind of simplicity. I am *not* saying that you should avoid certain words because they might become lies. *Any* word can be a lie. I am saying that “simple” has so many different meanings that it doesn’t actually say anything useful. If I see a module called Exception::Easy in a list of modules, I have *absolutely no idea* what it does. In contrast, if it was Exception::Class::Functions, I could immediately guess pretty well at what it does, even if I didn’t know exactly. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
