A new critical blog discussing Seaside

I would like to point the members of this mailing list to my new blog on Seaside and Smalltalk: http://thesmalltalkblog.blogspot.com

The background is in:
1) the complete absence of documentation in the Seaside library
2) the many violations of proper Smalltalk encapsulation
3) the frequent lack of "good Smalltalk" programing style
4) the many wrong and misleading class names, method names and instance variable names
5) the extreme ignorance that I had to encounter when offering my assistance to improve Seaside to Lukas Renggli.

I invite everybody to build a little community to document and improve Seaside, which will save all of us and all future users a lot of time.

There is never ever any excuse for not documentation code! Even in Smalltalk!

I also invite other critical writers to join in to publishing concrete engineering proposals on my blog in order to improve Seaside.


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It will be easier for your ideas to be listened if put more effort in taking
away bad emotions. Enphasis with a bit of drama could be ok to illustrate but
nobody will have time to deal with your anger. Some things you wrote there do
have sense so just manage to comunicate that in a positive way and see what
happens. I don't mean less negative I mean positive. Otherwise you'll just help
polluting the seaside ecosystem instead of making a better place. In short:
after reading that I feel you are with focus in war instead of focusing in
progress.
And you did it annonymously, which leaves your ideas in a weaker position. What
did you pretend with that? to create the annonymous seaside critic comunity?
leaded by whom?
don't misundertand me: I consider good critics as precious
sebastian

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It's useful to be critical.

But I think many of your things are blown out of proportion.

You also seem to be unware of important facts:

(a) Lukas is *not* the lead Seaside dev -- just an advocate, like I am
(b) everything you've found wrong is either already in the Seaside bug
    tracker, or you can easily put it there, where someone will fix it
    given resources
(c) the 2.9 release has gone a long ways towards documenting all the classes

but most importantly:

(d) telling volunteers that they aren't doing their job in a way that *you*
    find acceptable is about the least effective way to change behavior.
    Seriously.

And in the long run, this will harm the Seaside community more
than help it, because people googling for Seaside will see your
blog.

What did we do, as a community, to deserve your wrath?

Here's how you can help:

(1) report specific things you find to the tracker
(2) get involved *solving* those bugs by joining the dev team instead
    of yelling at them (or in their general direction)
(3) stop with the hysterics in your blog - getting third parties agitated
    is harmful, not helpful.

The real question is that you must ask yourself:

- Do you want Seaside to succeed?
- Or do you just want to point out that Seaside has failed you, without
  actually having tried to help Seaside?

Choose one.  You can't choose both.

Also, with your blog controls being in German, I can't post there, other
than tapping at random buttons and hoping they work.

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[hidden email] wrote:
> I would like to point the members of this mailing list to my new blog on Seaside and Smalltalk: http://thesmalltalkblog.blogspot.com
Your comments may or may not be valid - I don't really know, and don't really care. If you wish Seaside to improve, though, may I suggest working on the way you express your points?

The way in which you communicate strongly affects how the people you
address will react to you.

In particular, saying that someone is "unconditionally arrogant and
ignorant" does not help you persuade that person to accept your changes!
So here's an idea: cut the sarcasm, cut the vitriol, and change your
attitude. That might go a long way towards gaining the cooperation of
the Seaside developers.

frank
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Please ignore this guy and the posts he is writing. He is a troll.

Indeed, he was calling me yesterday on my work phone. Without
introduction he was insulting me and the whole Seaside community. He
eventually hung up without having identified himself and without
letting me finish my explanations.

Cheers,
Lukas

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That's too funny. I guess we should be proud as a community; we have our
own trolls = we made it! :)

-Boris

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-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]
[mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Lukas
Renggli
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 1:24 PM
To: Seaside - general discussion
Subject: Re: [Seaside] A new critical blog discussing Seaside

Please ignore this guy and the posts he is writing. He is a troll.

Indeed, he was calling me yesterday on my work phone. Without
introduction he was insulting me and the whole Seaside community. He
eventually hung up without having identified himself and without
letting me finish my explanations.

Cheers,
Lukas

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On 17-Apr-09, at 12:30 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> 5) the extreme ignorance that I had to encounter when offering my  
> assistance to improve Seaside to Lukas Renggli.


It's been awhile since I've seen any character assassination on a  
Smalltalk mailing list.

Ignore it.

Lukas was quite helpful in resolving bugs, and doing some code re-
factoring to help in our launch of
WikiServer (aka Pier) on the iPhone.

We pushed the submit button to the app store about 37 minutes ago.  
Without his efforts it wouldn't have happened.

http://www.mobilewikiserver.com/Welcome.html

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>>>>> "John" == John M McIntosh <[hidden email]> writes:

John> We pushed the submit button to the app store about 37 minutes ago.  Without
John> his efforts it wouldn't have happened.

John> http://www.mobilewikiserver.com/Welcome.html

Woo hoo!

[Michael - can you pick this up for Squeak news?]

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Hi maskedCumcumber

        (in france this is a comix hero: a cumcumber with a mask).

1- My name is stephane ducasse and I think that you should not piss on  
people anonymously
it gives a funny impression of yourself and lower your point. RIght  
now you are passing for an idiot
while you have certainly something to say. So be a man :).
You can express yourself politely or not on this mailing- of course we  
prefer polite and civilized people.

2- I agree with you that having more comments on seaside would be good  
and I will tell you
the truth: the first class comments on seaside were written by lukas  
in my car when I was
driving to nice in an italian highway. Of course more comments would  
be useful.
But did you pay to complain so rudely?
and where is your "documentation"?

3-After I know well lukas and he is the guy that did slime for  
checking style in Seaside application.
Did you read the mailing-list over the last years because lukas  
replied everyday to people questions
while he is doing a PhD on a completely different topic. So I have  
problem to  see lukas rude.
May be you were so aggressive that he told you to leave him alone.

4-Why don't you ask publicly why a string was used?
When I learned Smalltalk 12 years ago I read a book telling that  
strings are cheap to create
slow to compare, while symbols where the inverse so if the web server  
returns a string
it may be more efficient to compare a string than to convert it into a  
symbol and compare it.

Stephane Ducasse (you see this is easy to be someone)


On Apr 17, 2009, at 9:30 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

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excellent!

Stef

On Apr 17, 2009, at 10:33 PM, John M McIntosh wrote:

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amazing that maskedCumcumber could even call you.
Lukas you have bad frequentations :)
sorry I could not resist.

Stef

On Apr 17, 2009, at 10:24 PM, Lukas Renggli wrote:

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http://www.leconcombre.com/
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2009/4/17 stephane ducasse <[hidden email]>:
That kinda plays into it. The bigger problem is that Symbol is not a
subtype of String. Semantics differ across dialects in slight but
interesting ways. That's why it's part of our coding conventions [1]
not to mix Strings and Symbols.

However this is really framework internal code. Unless you're a core
developer you shouldn't mess with these things and there is not much
value in understanding them because they are implementation details
that are subject to change. And honestly if this is our worst code
then we can consider Seaside done.

And finally we do of course accept contributions be it code or
documentation. Roger Whitney contributed some really awesome class
comments.

 [1] http://www.seaside.st/community/conventions

Cheers
Philippe
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great Jhon! congrats! all the best man. Please do us a favor and become
millionaire with it :)

hey guys, talking about community there is another seaside based service that is
today's leader in our segment.

Should be no necessary to say but if you want to help our industry segment you
can show some love voting for it here:
http://www.cnet.com/html/ww/100/2009/poll/productivity.html?tag=mncol

Is too obvious that I've readed today: "competence is evolution"?  heh ;)

cheers,

sebastian

 

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Sebastian Sastre wrote: One of my fields of interest is emotional abuse.

When a person who points out a problem raises an issue, if the response
is to say that "the problem is theirs, that they have a problem", this
is abusive. So Lukas, calling him a "troll", is actually abusive. If you
want references to this principle I can provide them.

Mr Cucumber is raising issues. We need to identify the actual issues and
see if they need addressing. Turning around and shooting the messenger
is frequently used as the first line of defence so as not to actually
engage with any of the issues raised.

Secondly anger is a truth based emotion, it carries a valuable message,
unlike lie based emotions. Personally I dont see much anger in his blog,
I see honesty as expressed from his perception. In fact there is far
less anger expressed here than I would expect. I know I have been there,
and I am sorry to say that I agreed with most of the points raised, with
a couple of reservations.

I have had little or no contact with the 2.9 team, so I suspect/hope
that some of his criticisms may be over a year out of date.

Secondly I have come to the concusion that some of what might be
interpreted as arrogance is cultural. For example when handing out food
to the homeless, I always found that some foreigners would snatch the
food and scoff it without a word of a thank you. This to a conservative
English lad at the time was extremely rude. However a number of years
later I learned that for some cultures, the "thank you" IS the eagerness
to eat what is given.

It appears to me that Lukas, Phillippe and others, put defending the
code base first, rather than engaging with the person. This is the
cultural distinction, engineering vs human relations. These are two
separate fields, it is when they mix that we get problems. For human
relations we need a framework for harnessing peoples ideas and
contributions somewhere for them to go, some communication and assurance
that their work however small or incomplete is considered valuable.  We
need some form of buffer between the enthusiasm of contributors and the
code base. By establishing their bar of engineering excellence over the
code base, this is then mistaken for arrogance in the the human
relations field. Any contribution that cannot be expressed as a perfect
code contribution that applies to the existing code base is summarily
dismissed without comment. The result being that the enthusiam of
potential contributors is turned to exactly the opposite.

This is a valid issue which I am grateful to Mr Cucumber for raising,
because it happens to me frequently and as a result I made a conscious
decision not to bother even considering contributing back to the seaside
core again. For the same reason I will not contribute to Pharo, and I
think at least three times before I make any commit to Pier/Magritte.

For example, I have written a library which extends Magritte to support
Scriptaculous, so that fields may dynamically depend upon each other. So
my Magritte-Scriptaculous library has been sitting there for a long
time. I do wonder whether Lukas has ever looked at it, I know for
certain he has never contributed towards it. I have no idea of the value
of my contribution, I have no idea whether anyone is using it, and get
very little feedback as to whether it is any good or not. In short there
is no suggestion or clue available as to whether this contribution of my
time and effort is actually valuable to the community or not. It sits in
a contributions void, and gives no signals that would encourage me to
make further contributions. If at some point Lukas decides that he wants
dynamic support added to Magritte, I now fully expect him to write his
own, without even referring to mine. Is that arrogance? I don't know any
more, I have raised this issue ad infinitum on the Pharo list, and they
don't seem to think so.

If you make a contribution to Beach any contribution, I dont care how
small, how badly coded, how lacking in tests it is. I view your input as
valuable, and I welcome you to the team. I will join you in making your
work something of worth to the Beach community. I believe that there is
another way.

Keith

p.s. The issue of his being anonymous is also irrelevant to any actual
issues raised. There are many very good reasons for remaining anonymous
on the internet. When I find emails I have written dating back 15 years,
it makes me wish I was a bit more anonymous myself.




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> 3-After I know well lukas and he is the guy that did slime for
> checking style in Seaside application.
Slime what is slime?

"If there is no documentation it may as well not exist"

Keith



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http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/blog/slime 


-Boris

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-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]
[mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Keith
Hodges
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 3:30 PM
To: Seaside - general discussion
Subject: Re: [Seaside] A new critical blog discussing Seaside


> 3-After I know well lukas and he is the guy that did slime for
> checking style in Seaside application.
Slime what is slime?

"If there is no documentation it may as well not exist"

Keith



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At Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:48:34 +0200,
stephane ducasse wrote:
>
> 4-Why don't you ask publicly why a string was used?
> When I learned Smalltalk 12 years ago I read a book telling that  
> strings are cheap to create
> slow to compare, while symbols where the inverse so if the web server  
> returns a string
> it may be more efficient to compare a string than to convert it into a  
> symbol and compare it.

  And somebody should tell him that selecting _n and pressing
Cmd-shift-e would get the list of methods with it.

-- Yoshiki

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Boris Popov wrote:
> http://www.lukas-renggli.ch/blog/slime 
>
>
> -Boris
>
>  
I have 14000 emails in my seaside folder - put "slime" in the subject
search box and I get Zero results. How come slime doesnt even get an
announcment email?

Keith

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On Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:11:28 +0100
Keith Hodges <[hidden email]> wrote:

Maybe because Lukas "only" blogged about it instead of announcing
it here?

I have only about 7000, but get 10 hits for a thread on "make slime more
accessible" from seaside-dev and 59 messages for searching message
bodies for slime, including the ANN for seaside 2.8.3 where "Slime has
been added" ...

s.
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