On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 at 09:59 -0600, Josh Coates wrote: > > >such that things are so easy it seems like magic > > if you (or someone out there who went to the lecture) would humor me, could > you answer three questions: > > what are 'things'?
All kinds of things. Most of his examples involved source filtering of perl which allowed him to write e.g. a magic comments module. Dev just has to follow a special commenting rule (like javadoc) and special debug and/or progress bar magic happens at runtime. The thrust was, "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". > 'so easy' for who? > the coder? the user? the maintainer? Yup. > 'seems like magic' to who? > the coder? the user? the maintainer? Yup. Most of his examples were about perl modules making the magic aimed at the coder, and of course when you're designing an API it's the coder, too, but the principle is equally useful for those other audiences too. -- .O. Hans Fugal | De gustibus non disputandum est. ..O http://hans.fugal.net | Debian, vim, mutt, ruby, text, gpg OOO | WindowMaker, gaim, UTF-8, RISC, JS Bach --------------------------------------------------------------------- GnuPG Fingerprint: 6940 87C5 6610 567F 1E95 CB5E FC98 E8CD E0AA D460
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