Team Development / Exporting stuff to text files

[Richard Gaskin]

David Bovill wrote:

> Seperating data from code is surely a good idea and not one encouraged
> by the stack metaphor?

A stack can be used as a data store only, separate from other stacks 
which can be used for the UI, separate still from stacks used as 
libraries to drive it all.

Quite flexible, the stack object.

> Many moons ago, Richard,
>> Jacque and myself tried to create a 'team approach' to creating a new
>> property editor-- I believe we ended up each rolling our own.
> 
> And that I would say is a classic story for many such Rev based
> collaborative projects. My opinion is that the amount of effort it takes to
> develop sufficiently robust collaborative tools is on par with the amount of
> effort it took RunRev to develop their IDE, anything that fall much short of
> that will be discarded by individual developers on the basis that their own
> ROI. They will end up rolling there own.

Actually, in that case it wasn't for the lack of collaborative tools.

In fact, rather the opposite:  it's just so easy to write stuff in Rev 
that simply doing so took less time than even talking about it.

That's the other side of the collaboration equation which may have 
little opportunity for tools support but where the greatest loss of 
per-person productivity lies: talking, getting other team members to 
first understand your own ideas and then to adopt them as their own.

Even with something as simple as a property sheet we encountered a wide 
variety of differences in the details of each of our designs.  In the 
end I donated the one I've been shipping with devolution for so many 
years, and left it for RunRev to do with it what they will.   Seems even 
internally within a single company working through such design details 
takes time. ;)

Adding programmers is expensive, and more expensive the more closely 
their work overlaps, as it requires more talking.

Splitting work up into black boxes lets each programmer contribute with 
the productivity of a solo effort, yet allow the project to benefit from 
having multiple components developed simultaneously.

Stacks work well for organizing the work into black boxes.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
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