Muted Template <Review/Critique/Suggestions>

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Christopher
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Re: Muted Template <Review/Critique/Suggestions>

Post by Christopher »

M2tM wrote:Well, considering every post in here is talking about frameworks, the first question has been asked by every person here.
Every framework I know, and all those mentioned use templates and a templating language. The fact that many use PHP as their templating language may be something that you don't like ... but that does not mean they don't use templates.
M2tM wrote:Functions and classes are "alternative syntax", why not write everything in machine language? What I have here is a layer of abstraction. It is a similar layer of abstraction to other templating languages and in that regard it is an alternative syntax, but it provides more flexibility and has a different focus than other template systems I am aware of and in that regard it is more useful.
I think I addressed this regarding DSLs. Ultimately yours is an alternate syntax. You can defend the rational for your syntax choices all you want. Either people like it or they don't. Whoever uses your system would probably not care about the code as long as everything worked and it was fast. It is the template syntax that is significant. Do you have a complete spec for your YATL?
M2tM wrote:The fact is, I posted this for consideration by peers and I've got more posts talking about unrelated stuff, I count 2 posts directly about the project posted for review (other than my own) and I am responding to the few questions I've found in an attempt to cut through the static. If people don't find it interesting I suppose that's fine, but I was hoping for some honest feedback about the project itself rather than a detailed debate on unrelated frameworks.
I don't think any of it was unrelated. They may be things to did not want to hear ... but that is a different matter. I certainly take into account comments that guys like pytrin and josh post (even if I don't want to hear it ;)) and have benefited greatly from it.
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M2tM
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Re: Muted Template <Review/Critique/Suggestions>

Post by M2tM »

As interesting as it may be, metadiscussion about patterns tangentially related to general frameworks which may or may not have anything to do with my project isn't really something I can act on and thus isn't directly useful to me. I'm not here to deny anybody's opinions. I'm not here to ignore suggestions. But if we're arguing the merits of systems I have not designed and that do not relate to the code I put up for discussion I'm not really sure what you expect me to say about it.

It would be like if you put up a snippet of code to do a bubble sort and asked for comments and critique on the code and the interface you provide. You offer the insight that you know it isn't useful on large sets of data, but that you are using it in a situation where the data is mostly ordered already and so it works for -your- specific problem domain. Then in response you have people discussing various sorting algorithms such as quicksort and heapsort and implementations done by other people involving those with basically no comment on the original source. That's kind of what I think has happened here. I am not invalidating such discussion, simply saying that I don't know what to do with it in regards to my project and goals.

Every direct comment and question I've done my best to address and take into consideration, so far it's mostly been trying to get a handle on how the language works and so most of my posts have been trying to distill that down into a more focused topic so that people can pick it up, look at it, and provide concrete feedback.

All of this said, if you see a few specific comments that I have missed due to not understanding how exactly they relate to what I am doing, please feel free to quote and explain. I acknowledge I may have missed some stuff, but in general the conversation doesn't appear to have been aimed at me or my project and so I wasn't really sure how to respond to many posts. Instead I picked the posts that I recognized as actually addressing my project and responded to those in great detail.

I do not have a complete specification of the language in any particular format at this time. Part of this reason is that each tag defines its own syntax and tags are plugins which could technically be written by anybody anywhere. Right now I believe it is small enough and simple enough to get by on examples, unit tests, and descriptions. I don't think many template languages provide or need formal specification because usually the language is defined by its implementation and this is especially true in a plugin based language.

Trying desperately to steer this topic back on-course, please check my posts on the previous page in regards to some real life examples if you missed those!
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