on the topic of TAOO

MisterX b.xavier at internet.lu
Sun Oct 16 00:17:42 EDT 2005


I'll try to give a few short answers as this starts to really get detailed
or repetivive one way or the other... ;)

First, I want to thank all those who had written back.

Andre wrote

> maybe the "problem" with TAOO is that it's so tuned to your 
> workflow and the way you think, that we're not able to 
> understand it due to the fact we're not you. Sometimes we 
> build software to serve our own necessity and those softwares 
> are the hardest to explain for they need to serve only for 
> us, they were not created so that everyone could understand them.

I see your point but the other point is that the gui I present is
rather "standard" in composition: Menus, index, views of the object
or card or record in a tab. 

Open your history pane or favorites pane
in your web browser, and you will see what I mean. It’s the same
in the explorer, firefox, avantbrowser, the same again in outlook,
NetBackup, and so on...

The workflow GUI is standard. The way things work internally is "clearly"
explained in the documentation.


> To illustrate, let me tell you of a software that I use all 
> the time while coding in Rev and yet I never shared. I call 
> it "Alfred", it's as hard to explain as TAOO for it's very 
> abstract, yet I make use of it everyday. Alfred is a stack, 
> with only one input field and nothing more. The heart of 
> Alfred is a clever RegEx generator/parser that is generated 
> and executed at runtime. See, no one can understand it!?!?  
> Now, let us explain what problem Alfred solves so that people 
> can understand about it. One thing I hate is to keep 
> switching applications, I like the apple newton model where 
> everything is at your fingertip, one feature I like best of 
> the newt is the "Assist"  
> feature that enables me to write phrases like "have lunch 
> with britney spears tomorrow" and it will parse it for me and 
> book an appointment with britiney spears for me tomorrow in 
> the calendar, also it will fetch britney contact from the 
> contact database if present. I can almost talk with a newt 
> using the Assist feature. I missed that on my mac, so I built 
> Alfred to clone that, by clever use of RegEx expressions I 
> can tell alfred to do things for me, like booking 
> appointments, stick notes, sending emails, browsing to 
> pages.... So in the end, what Alfred enables me is never to 
> leave Rev and work from there. Alfred is tied to iCal, Apple 
> Mail and AddressBook so it can use data from all this 
> applications (even the terminal is now hooked, sending shell 
> commands). If I simply shared Alfred, people would look and 
> ask all sorts of questions like why he's generating the 
> parsing routine at runtime? Thats why I never shared the 
> thing, until I polish it so anyone can understand and make 
> use of it, it will stay at my HD (and in the HD of those that 
> want to see my spaghetti code).

What you say I understand clearly. The app you mention sounds
great and comparable to something I tried to work on long ago.
But I had no objects, no verbs so I couldn't make it work until
that set of verbs and objects were known to the system. Which is
one result of all these libraries, their modular workflow and
resulting organization (not rev dependent).

> Maybe you should start thinking as a stranger, like, would a 
> stranger without my background, understand this? One thing I 
> learned from Sivakatriswami is that "documenting is half the 
> fun"™ By documenting as you code, you'll sure make TAOO more 
> understendable for us. Like, make a pool, let the community 
> ask questions, go building on top of those questions like a 
> FAQ, then, some time later, it will be easy to understand TAOO

I tried that but no one asked questions. When they did, my
answers were still confusing. There's only one way to explain
a concept and I tried to use examples, analogies... still it
doesn't go through... Yet it's so simple and obvious (at least
to me). I know it's not that they didn't try nor that the 
concept is so alien. so my explanations must be the problem...

If I try to think as the developper, or the user, I explain it
that way as "oop control objects, etc" or as client records etc...

it's hard to say what is wrong. I tried to put up a forum and 
it wasn't so easy to manage after all - so im redoing my web site
in a more flexible environmnt - wiki - which hopefully will be
more inviting and clearer to the reader.

You could say that between TAOO and TikiWiki, the main difference 
is the underlying language that runs it... Is that easier to grasp?

I don’t think it does the concept justice (for either environment)...
We'll see in the future...

cheers
Xavier




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