[Catalyst] Catalyst Selling Points

[Charlton Wilbur]

On Dec 27, 2005, at 2:48 PM, Marlon Bailey wrote:
>> Exactly.  Right now Catalyst, as useful as it is, is being *marketed*
>> to hobbyist programmers and programmers with a bit of spare time who
>> have a little project they want done.  There's nothing wrong with
>> that, but if you want things like O'Reilly books there needs to be a
>> market for them, and that market is largely companies with book-
>> buying budgets.
>>
>> And *maintenance cost* -- which means automated testing and code
>> reuse -- is critical to this market.  Sure, CPAN and automated
>> testing are not exclusive to Catalyst, but pushing them to this
>> market will get Catalyst adopted a whole lot faster than pushing "80%
>> of your application within an hour!"
>  I think you're taking the statement used by whoever said "80% of  
> your application within an hour(I believe it was 30 minutes)!" out  
> of context.  He was saying it in relation to quick start  
> documentation; documentation apps are usually not very complex.  I  
> don't think he/she meant to say that you could do all of your apps  
> in X time.  And I agree with that approach and mentality for quick  
> start documentation, now if you feel that a quickstart app should  
> be more complex and take days then we can agree to disagree on that.

"You can reproduce an example quickly" is not exactly a strong  
selling point.   What happens when you need to do something for which  
there isn't an example?

> p.s. I still believe that a major selling point for any framework  
> should be time savings and rapid development(ie. one of the major  
> selling points of Perl).  Code reuse and automated testing, should  
> be understoods, not benefits. Is there a major competitive  
> framework that you can't write maintainable code on?  How does that  
> become a selling point, selling points are relative to the  
> competition.

If you push rapid development without maintainability, you get PHP  
and write-only Perl code.  This is not a good thing, and it is not a  
selling point; and most of the audience you really want to sell this  
to knows that.  Rapid development without any thought to  
maintainability is the reason Perl has a lot of its negative  
reputation.  It's all very well to say "code reuse and automated  
testing should be understood," but the simple fact is that they  
aren't, and they need to be pushed as benefits not because they're  
unique to Catalyst but because they are valuable and Catalyst lets  
you use them.

I think what this highlights is some murkiness about who the audience  
for this documentation is.  Who *is* the intended audience?  Novice  
programmers?  In that case, we'd better say a lot about code reuse  
and testing, because they *don't* have them as understood.   
Experienced Perl programmers looking at Catalyst?  In that case, we'd  
better say a lot about MVC, because MVC is not something commonly  
found in Perl, and about scaffolding, which is something that comes  
from the Rails world.  Experienced programmers who are new to Perl  
and to Catalyst?  In that case, the rapid development is probably a  
plus, but there should also be emphasis on how Catalyst makes writing  
clear, reusable code easy, because experienced programmers are likely  
to have run into write-only Perl before.

And yes, rapid development *is* a selling point.  But hyperbolic  
statements verging on outright lies are not helpful.  At the end of  
the day, if I want to use Catalyst instead of Rails, I need to sell  
it to my manager, and if the official documentation reads like  
marketing hype, I have a much harder time.

If all Catalyst has going for it is rapid development, it's doomed;  
fortunately, it has more than that, so why aren't the other benefits  
ever mentioned?

Charlton


-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur at tortus.com



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