[Catalyst] Is Catalyst large enough to sustain a book?

[Matt S Trout]

John Beppu wrote:
> On 4/28/06, Matt S Trout <dbix-class at trout.me.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Prototype is a complete joke technically. It's inflexible, a pain to extend
>> and does the equivalent of stuffing UNIVERSAL:: which means it doesn't
>> co-operate with other libraries sanely in a lot of cases.
> 
> If prototype is so bad at cooperating, why are so many people building
> libraries on top of prototype?  You've got script.aculo.us (
> http://script.aculo.us/ ), OpenRICO ( http://www.openrico.org/ ),
> moo.fx ( http://moofx.mad4milk.net/ ) , and prototype javascript
> windows (http://blogus.xilinus.com/pages/javawin) for starters.  If
> any Ruby people are lurking, I think they'll be able to cite a few
> more examples, but the point I'm trying to make is that prototype
> doesn't seem to be making life harder for people.  To the contrary,
> it's serving as a strong foundation for people to build bigger and
> better things upon.

Lots of people are writing libraries based on PHP4 and pre-.Net ASP too. 
What's your point?

> you looked at it as "using mixin classes to extend the standard
> library" it wouldn't sound so bad.

But I'd be lying if I said that. UNIVERSAL::* is a much closer explanation.

>> It's the sort of
>> awful honey trap that formmail.pl and friends from Matt's Script Archive were
>> for perl programming.
> 
> That's just disrespectful, because Matt (of Matt's Script Archive)
> lacked skill whereas the people who work on prototype are very skilled
> programmers.  Just because you disagree with their approach doesn't
> mean there isn't immense value in what they've done.

Bullshit. What they've done is awful and the world would be better off without 
it having ever existed.

> A lot of people found Javascript's standard library to be lacking, so
> the prototype people decided to fill some of those holes. 
> Furthermore, the only practical way to do it was by using mixins, so
> they did what they had to do, and I think we're better off for it.

That's what the MSA people said.

> The main problem with this approach is that other people will try to
> fill the same holes with methods with the same name but slightly (or
> wildly) different semantics.  Admittedly, this can fuck you up, but in
> practice, it doesn't happen that often.

There are no such holes. The authors simply have no fucking clue how 
Javascript works.

That's not my problem. If the Prototype authors actually learned how to write 
javascript, I might not mind so much. But that's their problem.

Don't try and make their incompetence our problem.

-- 
      Matt S Trout       Offering custom development, consultancy and support
   Technical Director    contracts for Catalyst, DBIx::Class and BAST. Contact
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