Fundamentally coding changes, I think, refect human needs as much as
technical needs. Even good old procedural programming, which many
college computer science advocates cannot let go of, had, I think, as
its main difficulty the inability of a community to effectively code
with it. So, many ostensibly pure theoretical issues, such as data
encapsulation, are really attempts to save us from inadvertent (or
advertent?) human limitations. I am grateful for Struts and the
community of users and developers. Most of the people on here I find
more than personally and professionally acceptable, including those that
are constantly carping at me with non-Struts related issues which
sometimes are so tangential to anything that I am amazed they could
care, and even admirable. I do think that we have to acknowledge that
at root the issues we are dealing with are not unrelated to egos and we
/necessarily /have them in Struts too. I am not against ego. I am for
directing it with mindful design decisions.
I too think the changes planned for Struts are significant.
Michael McGrady
Matt Bathje wrote:
http://struts.apache.org/roadmap.html
http://wiki.apache.org/struts/StrutsJericho
Seem like pretty significant potential changes to me. I think the
problem is that the way struts is currently proposed to change is not
the way that you (and some others) want it to. This is why you must
stop talking about it and start doing it in my opinion.
Even the proposed struts 2.0 stuff may not happen soon, as some of the
committers are happy as it is and/or moved on and/or too busy.
(Quoting Ted Husted...unless some young turk comes along and cranks
out a working codebase over a holiday weekend)
If you want your prpopsal to remain struts, setup a wiki whiteboard
for a while to get ideas, then code it and submit it to contrib like
was done with the Jericho idea. It may take off that way and become
struts 2.0, you never know.
I don't think I am (or anybody else is) being sensitive to CHANGING
struts. I think the problem is (and no offense intended here) that you
come off extremely abrasive in your emails, and we are sensitive to
that. Your phrasing of without ego in the core came off as extremely
confrontational on a personal level. That is what I took offense to.
Change struts all you want though, make it better, make it smaller,
make it make me dinner. That I am not sensitive to at all. I think
most everybody in the community would agree.
Matt
Michael McGrady wrote:
Thanks for your ideas, Matt. Some thoughts on this, relating the
personal issues as much to Struts as possible, follow:
The subtitle of eXtreme Programming eXplained is EMBRACE CHANGE
by Kent Beck. This is all I am saying. Struts as it looks to v3.0
should embrace change as potential, which will increase, not
decrease, the community. This means, to me, embrace the possibility
of change. This means, to me, components and whittling things that
are UNchangeable down rather than up. If you build dependency into a
core, you build ego there as well. That is all I am saying. I hope
that is considered to be a constructive point. If not, why not?
This has been a generic point about scientific and professional
community development at least since the 1970s. This has nothing to
do with any Struts committers or users in particular, although Struts
is not immune to the process which the issues address. I am
thinking, for example, in addition to the related movements in
programming and computer science about books like Kuhn's The Sources
of Scientific Revolution and the Popperian (Karl Popper) idea of
falsification as a root or core idea in intellectual and professional
development.
I really cannot believe how sensitive people on this list are to this
sort of thing. I really have no interest in these personal issues.
I do think that when people take comments about core issues to be
personal, then that is not my problem. I mean, do people read Freud
and take his comments about sexuality personally? I don't think so.
The core issues in programming development have human issues in
them. So, when we talk about component development and kernels and
so on, there are human issues. This includes ego. This does not
mean I am saying anything about the ego of Struts developers. I am
not. I am saying that dependency at the core will encourage personal
rather than Struts oriented commentary and goals. That is a point
about software development.
I too believe in doing rather than talking. I have a lot of code
that does what I am talking about. You know, I assume, about the
coding I have done on buttons. At this point, however, I am more
interested in thinking about it. Again, measure twice, cut once.
However, I am not a committee type guy either and I acknowledge
that you can talk something to death. I do think that the breadth of
my knowledge is probably less than needed to make great decisions
