> For the terminology to be considered a barrier to entry, I think you > need to demonstrate obviously superior terminology.
I agree with that and am happy to accept that our proposal is not good enough. We'll work on another. Evan On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Eric Evans<[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 15:05 -0700, Ryan King wrote: >> I would like to reiterate, one of our main motivations behind renaming >> the data model is to make it easier for people to get up to speed with >> Cassandra. > > This has been repeated several times during this thread. I hope it's not > meant to imply that those opposed do not care about our users, or about > making Cassandra easier to understand. > >> Evan and I both had problems understanding the data model and we've >> seen the same struggles over and over as we try and explain the data >> model to other engineers here at twitter. So, after developing this >> proposal for a new naming scheme, we tested it with more engineers, to >> see if it was, in fact, easier to explain. We didn't do a rigorous >> study, but without a doubt it was clearer and easier to understand. >> And these are all people who've read the BigTable and Dynamo papers, >> most of whom have CS (bachelors' or masters') degrees and are >> generally smart. > > Yeah, that's anecdotal. I could counter with anecdotal evidence to the > contrary but I don't think it would be very helpful or productive. > > I honestly feel like you guys are confounding the concepts, and the > terminology used to describe them. Granted, the right choice of > terminology could certainly make it easier to convey how things work, > but there is a sort of minimum overhead here. In other words, you can > call things whatever you want, it's not going to change how they > actually work. At least some portion of the difficulty people have in > conceptualizing Cassandra, are in fact the concepts themselves. > > [ ... ] > >> > So having thought it through I think I would have to say I think the >> > current names, if not perfect, are underrated. Even if making the >> > change were free, and it's obviously not, I would prefer the existing >> > terminology. >> >> I think, overall, the naming is a significant barrier to entry for new >> cassandra users. This proposal will certainly be expensive, both in >> terms of the work (which we at twitter are willing to do) and the >> disruption. However, we're still early in Cassandra's life and this >> may be our only chance to improve this situation. > > For the terminology to be considered a barrier to entry, I think you > need to demonstrate obviously superior terminology. > > -- > Eric Evans > [email protected] > > -- Evan Weaver
