[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope 3 as a reliable platform?!?
Philipp von Weitershausen
philipp at weitershausen.de
Mon Sep 4 10:49:25 EDT 2006
Chris Withers wrote:
> For me, the irony is that when Zope 2's development process was at its
> worst, this problem was at its best as there was so little change,
> enabling people to gather more knowledge without having to stop to
> re-learn their old knowledge.
It is my impression that it was Zope 2's obscenity towards API stability
which provoked the Zope 3 rewrite. We are only doing now what could have
been done (over the course of 4 to 5 years) much earlier. After all, the
"new religion" idea (Component Architecture) dates as far back as 2001.
> Sure, having to do:
>
> to_change = {}
> if obj.hasProperty(x):
> to_change[x]=x_value
> else:
> obj.manage_addProperty(x,x_value,x_type)
> obj.manage_changeProperties(**to_change)
>
> ...and remembering that manage_editProperties is BAD isn't that pretty,
> but it's been stable for so long that I can write it from memory now,
> and that's a big win.
Well, prettiness (or rather ugliness) aside, I'm having a problem
letting that argument count. C programmers could easily use the same
line of argumentation to say that manual error handling via return codes
may be more complicated than dealing with exceptions, but they've been
doing it for so many years that they can write it from memory now.
I for one prefer exceptions over manual error handling. And I prefer
straight-forward APIs over unnecessarily complicated constructs.
> So, for me, it would be great if developers would take more time to
> weigh up the "what does this new feature or refactoring bring" against
> the "how much of a PITA is it going to be for everyone else to relearn
> this"...
Agreed.
Philipp
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