World: r3wp

If you open up a design process even to highly qualified people, 
you are already on the first step towards design by commitee, which 
is entirely against REBOL's design philosophy. If the people are 
less qualified, it's the second step and you can end up trying to 
handle more noise than getting actual code done and the project will 
then truly move at a snail's pace.

I'm sitting in that position in my job projects, which has caused 
about two full years of delay, because I'm forced to write crap code 
to meet some silly deadlines. That code then later needs to be rewritten 
to meet my own personal quality requirements when no one else is 
looking at me or judging my work before it's done.

I'm sure Gabriele has a complete picture of VID3 in his head and 
it does no good to trample around on that picture, before he gets 
the chance to complete the work. I'm also certain that Carl has tried 
both things and going underground simply works best.

Ever noticed that most good movies has one script writer and that 
the script writer is also the director? And that most bad movies 
have 5-6 different script writers and a different director?

Actually I do it all the time.

I read all the messages and take notes ..

Every few days I release a new iteration of my software.

Henrik - I am not sure I was causing some major delays! I asked at 
times, when no active development was ongoing, so? Let's be realistic 
here - when is Gabriele available to finish it? I bet it would take 
him some 2 - 3 weeks part-time? And that, my friend, is the problem. 
Guys are busy with things, which do have higher priority. So unless 
someone commercially does not buy them free time to do so, the point 
is moot ...

Graham you are probably not in a situation where you need to start 
on a new project or build a program from scratch. Do you read messages 
and take notes on day 5 of project development after the design requirements 
are settled?

The fact that Gabriele is here talking to us suggests he has nothing 
to work on now ... also waiting for Carl!

Henrik .. I did a GUI mock up and the released the mock up.  Then 
I took suggestions after that :)

Graham, yes, but you didn't get comments during the mockup design 
process did you?

no, but that was only a day

yeah, so you don't really notice what it means to have people criticizing 
you during the design process.

Oh no, that is ongoing.

I get comments all the time.

your design process is very short. it's very different for a system 
like VID3. the rest is implementation, which is more trivial.

You did the same with Listview

but clearly not everyone can work the same way

The design process for LIST-VIEW was very short. It took a few days 
to build the first version. After that it was more an issue of getting 
features put on top of other features and spending time on bug fixing. 
There was very little actual design after the first version.

Henrik - I did not criticize during the design process - there was 
6 months delay, so I started to study it, and put quesiton on table. 
Then there was one month or so of development of GOBs dialect and 
other things - once again - most of my questions came in different 
period - after the release. And Gabriele did not release often in 
order for me to disrupt his dev. process ...

Is this leading to anywhere?

But that short design process also caused some lock-ins: It's not 
possible to create horizontal scrolling, something that Pekr wanted 
badly and never got. I wanted to implement column rearrangement via 
drag'n'drop, but it turned out to require about 20-30 kb extra code. 
Row drag and drop is horrible code. So the base design is far from 
brilliant or sufficiently generic to satisfy every condition of use.

Graham - it is just leading to filling some eventually free time 
and shorten waiting for the next best thing - GIDI :-)

GIDI?? like vidi, vinci vici ?

GIDI is Carl's preliminary name for VID3.4.

what's the acronym stand for ?

Graphics is there for sure :-)

I hope intelligent design is not there!

GIDI: "Graphical interactive dialect interface"

not great

We could as well call it GDI, it is already known in MS world :-)

I suggested GINA, but don't remember what it stands for :-)

DVI .... dialected visual interface

DVI is already hw inteface, isn't it?

that's called overloading :)

:-)

There is SilverLight, MoonLight, Flash, we planned FireSide, SideLight, 
or something like that - but that is more for a product name, than 
to call some subsystem ...

RebolLight

Doesn't it sound like kind of product? Express, Light, Demo?

yeah

But why not, would be fun - I am proud of REBOL :-)

REBOLight

Thermite ?

flash in a pan :)

isn't thermite explosive? :-)

yes, it creates flashes

so, we have a product that is capable of creating flash like graphics 
and better.

Or we can call it similar to Flash - Fresh, or reFresh

nah ... want something different and better

If GIDI is revolutionary, we want the ParadigmShift :-)

The tough thing to appreciate is that VID is a general-purpose entry/mid-level 
dialect.  R2/VID has been in the wild for 6yrs(?) now and we have 
certainly gone through periods of isolating key weaknesses, but we 
all have a tendency to have had starry-eyed visions for what VID 
should be.  The practical gets mixed in with the possibility when 
it's time for action.


I think the community would be better served with a strong VID alternative 
(not as a slight to RebGUI which does very well acheiving its stated 
aims) not bound by Carl's constraints for the entry level language, 
and open (as in open) source with very clear aims.  It has to be 
independent and perhaps needs to span R2 and R3, at least initially. 
 We have the capabilities, resources and talent to do it, but instead 
try to hammer these ideas into VID.


This isn't intended to be a rallying cry -- it's just my assessment 
based on observation and involvement.  Such an undertaking would 
have inevitable difficulty overcoming the differing visions of interested 
parties.  Conversely, it's within us to create an enduring, enviable 
framework...