[MacRuby-devel] Feedback: Dispatch high-level wrappers

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Feb 8, 2010, at 5:46 PM, Ernest N. Prabhakar, Ph.D. wrote:

> For MacRuby 0.6, I'd like to provide higher-level convenience APIs to reduce the "cognitive overhead" and "semantic noise" of using Grand Central Dispatch.  In other words, let people do what they want without having to learn or type as much as they do now.

My first impression is "wow, cool!" followed by a second impression of "Hmmm!  That's a lot of semi-parallel parallelization mechanisms to digest at one time!"

Which is not to say that I think you've overdone it here - this may be exactly the right number of permutations - but I'm having a hard time getting my head around the totality of what you're proposing clients of this code can actually do with it.  Having links to the implementations themselves is cool, and provides a fine API reference of a sort, but I think these sorts of concepts are far better conveyed through usage cases than implementation details.  Maybe if each of your bullets came with a small code fragment which demonstrated how to use the wrapper to solve Real World Problem Foo, even managers like myself could make the individual cognitive leaps much more readily.  :-)

- Jordan