[MacRuby-devel] HotCocoa futures

[Rich Morin]

At 7:29 PM +0100 12/23/11, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> On Dec 23, 2011, at 2:47 AM, isaac kearse wrote:
>
> Are you aware that HotCocoa is being actively developed again?
>
>https://github.com/HotCocoa/hotcocoa/blob/master/History.markdown
>
>
> That's good to know.  It would also be good to know, if and
> when the subject ever comes up, what its mission statement
> currently is.  Front-end all of AppKit?  All of AppKit AND
> Foundation?   Neither of those, but provide convenience
> functions if and only when a certain conciseness (as
> expressed in percentage of code saved) is achievable?  This
> is something I have been wondering ever since Rich started
> the project, since it definitely achieves an admirable degree
> of brevity over the equivalent ObjC code, but where do you
> stop?  How will we know when HotCocoa is "done"? :-)

I'm not all that worried about whether HotCocoa is ever "done",
but I do think there are some interesting questions about how
additions should be managed.  As Jordan suggests, there could
be rules for accepting additions, eg:

  ... if and only when a certain conciseness (as expressed in
  percentage of code saved) is achievable ...

Details aside, it can be good to know what kinds of things are
likely to be accepted (or rejected) without much discussion.
That said, I would like HotCocoa to be a continuing dialogue
for ways to make MacRuby code clearer and more idiomatic.

I think that "code forums" such as GitHub are extremely well
suited to this sort of dialogue.  If I want to try out a new
idiom or feature, I can simply fork the project and hack.  If
my work shows promise, I can push it back to GitHub and make
an announcement.

The trickier question is how to get reliable infrastructure
out of such a dialogue.  The traditional approach involves a
cabal of "core committers", but Git and GitHub projects are
not required to be organized in this fashion.

In any case, I'm not particularly worried.  If we have robust
participation in HotCocoa use and development, the details
can and will be worked out.

-r
-- 
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm            Rich Morin
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