Re: FWIW: script vs. configurtion file

[saint@eng.it]

Steve Litt writes:
 > On Wed, 23 Jul 2014 16:35:01 +0200
 > saint@eng.it wrote:
 > 
 > > Steve Litt writes:
 > > 
 > >  > Although I spent 14 years making my living as a software developer,
 > >  > there are times when I don't want the freedom to do absolutely
 > >  > anything. This is why I switched away from Perl: I needed some
 > >  > limitations.
 > > 
 > > Despite  limits may  be  a fun  challenge,  I prefer  to  give a  good
 > > configuration ready and let everyone free to do as she likes.
 > > 
 > > That's the Debian way, and works quite well (even if not perfectly
 > > well).
 > 
 > So then, it sounds to me like you would want to write your program as
 > an API, document the API, and let the user write one or more
 > [Perl|Python|Ruby|Lua] programs to use the API to make the program
 > work their way.

You have three ways to write a program: write simple programs that do
one thing and can be combined with other programs to do more complex
things (i.e. `ls /bin /usr/bin` #command substitution implied :) ),
write a program with a set of capabilities and write a program with
a set of capabilities PLUS an extension mechanism. An interpreted
language is, in my experience, the easiest way, since the user could
write the extension on the fly.

 > So then, for the program, you would use a different
 > design process. For instance, when I start to design a program, my first
 > question is "what data will be involved?" But to design the program as
 > an API, I would think the first question would be "What capabilities
 > do I want the user to have?"

Usually a program has "use cases" that is "doing some actions on some
information". You need both of them.

 > You know, the beauty of doing it your way would be that various people
 > would write all sorts of [Perl|Python|Ruby|Lua] programs to make your
 > API do different things, so it would be sort of like you wrote 50
 > programs at one time. And of course, the knowledgeable user could
 > modify one of those  [Perl|Python|Ruby|Lua] programs to make your
 > program perform in yet another unique way.

True.

A less knowledgeable user would use the program as is or import
"modules" other people create.

I am not an expert in image manipulation software but I use the modules
other people wrote for The Gimp.

Guess why Emacs is so large :)

-- 
 /\           ___                                    Ubuntu: ancient
/___/\_|_|\_|__|___Gian Uberto Lauri_____               African word
  //--\| | \|  |   Integralista GNUslamico            meaning "I can
\/                 coltivatore diretto di software       not install
     già sistemista a tempo (altrui) perso...                Debian"

Warning: gnome-config-daemon considered more dangerous than GOTO