I created this page to place anything what somebody feels are flames. I find out I created many of this kind of comments and was once even considered to be a troll. I looked it up in jargon dictionary, was enlinghtened, and changed my ways - so you can do it, too

-- PeterMasiar - 18 Jun 2003

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From PleaseCreateNewWeb:

It sad we have to "poll" for this, but ....

Governments, and I mean that in the widest sense of governing bodies, that consistency ignore the feelings of their constituents, tend to become the vitims of revolutions. It doens't matter whether they are democratic institutions where there is the mechanism to vote them out, or totalitarian/absolutist ones. You can't dam up the pressure for change indefinitely.

-- AntonAylward - 01 Jun 2003

All shame to the core team for not producing them compelte as part of their initial documentation and for not maintianing them. They represent a prime focus for tracking development and documentation. (I know, because I use such an approach on the TWikis I use for PM.)

Shame ??? If you feel this documentation needs writing, I would suggest you write it - it will be welcomed by all. Given the choice of code that I can read, understand, and use from the core team, or just hot air I will gladly take code even half working and poorly documented - given efforts on TWiki are in the general case in addition to people's day jobs.

-- TWikiGuest - 02 Jun 2003

By the way, I liked TWikiGuest's comment above about how people who want better code documentation should just write it - as always, it's much easier to complain about things or suggest that someone else does the work than to actually do it... There are no obstacles to writing docs about the core code, so I don't see why the CoreTeam should be the ones to do this, let alone why they should feel 'shame', given that they have little enough time to write code anyway.

-- RichardDonkin - 02 Jun 2003

Rambling ideas and disussion are great while working on the design, but somewhere what is decided on has to be put ina form that handles the complexity.

As I say, UML and OO were intended to better handle the management of complexity and apply focus to documenting the use, packaging and definition of interfaces/functionality. TWiki sorely needs something that does this.

The attitude of many of the core team boils down to saying that since they know what's going on, since they understand it all, such a discipline is not needed.

There's nothing new in this. The history of software documents such attitudes among programmers four and five decades ago. Programmers document for programmers, when and if they do. The code drives the documentation, as opposed the documented specification (ala use-case and E-R models, etc) driving the development. Testing is in terms of the code rather than the specification. Its not difficult to go through Support, Codev and Plugins and find many examples to support that.

As I say, none of this is new. It has plagued software for more decades than any of here have been alive. But that's not an excuse. The disciplines and tools to deal with these issues are also decades old. The usual excuse I hear from the programmers who work for me is that they inhibit their freedom of expression and creativity. That's long since shown to be bunkum.

-- AntonAylward - 02 Jun 2003