Paul McGuire wrote:
I just stumbled upon a great-looking project, to make Zope3 more
approachable to mere mortals such as myself. Echoing the ROR mantra
of "convention over configuration", the Grok project (http://
grok.zope.org/) aims to stand on the shoulders of Zope3, while
providing the ease of development of ROR (for instance, no more ZCML).
Philipp von Weitershausen has a set of slides at
http://philikon.de/files/grok-bbq-sprint.pdf, and the Grok project
page links to a number of tutorials.
Am I the last person to hear about this?
No, not anymore since I learned about it later than you :-)
However I can assure you this won't work. I'll tell you why.
I'm a reasonably experienced python programmer and eager and interested
to explore new -to me- paradigms, especially when there seems to be a
possibility for making some money. I was lucky to find some programming
job where I could learn zope and plone and make some money at the same
time. I noticed that somewhere between pure python and zope there is a
division where one cannot cross except by *paying* someone some money in
order to learn how things work. When I told my employer at the time
about this -he was totally *not* a programmer- the response was like,
hey, but his other guy learned about it in one month etc, etc, or he
just pointed at some plone programming colleagues who 'kicked ass'. Upon
inspection of the 'ass kicking' colleagues' code I noticed that they had
only a very rudimentary knowledge of python, or even didn't know much
about programming altogether.
There is no way around paying money because however 'intuitive' the code
seems to be to the developers it is just not possible to read their
sourcecode and understand what they are doing. This is a result of
rapidly changing conventions that make it impossible to reproduce or
adapt working code to one's specific likings. So the code examples are
just one offs, working only for this specific case. Any adaptation will
break the code, forcing one to contact -and pay- the developers, who are
probably already working on some more advanced version.
As result we see the emergence of 'more easy' solutions -like plone-
which try to hide the complexities of zope for the end user but end up
becoming even harder to 'grok' because the zope developers are racing
ahead and don't bother to explain things unless they get paid. And why
shouldn't they because they have to make a living too, don't they? Well
I've got to make a living too and being forced to continually follow
them around unable to pay for education and as a consequence not able to
reproduce their code is just not financially feasible. Sorry, but this
stuff is only 'grokkable' for the early adopters, however good ones'
general python skills are.
The problem gets even worse because by now -in order to make any money
programming zope at all- one has to learn the zillion different ways
_plone_ makes things 'easier' (it's not like there is a clean slate when
one starts to work at a zope/plone programming site). The plone
community is generally despised by the zope community because they are
even more programming for money and not for universal enlightenment. I
even suspect some plone programmers of hiding essential information from
colleagues because that make *them* the experts, it's either that or
maybe they just don't know themselves why things work the way they do
and can't answer questions. OK, lets give them the benefit of doubt.
While such deviousness generally cannot be assumed for the zope
developers - try and ask questions on zope versus plone forums and
notice the difference in attitude to persons asking for information-
there is still a large difference in the way the zope community and the
general python community 'think' about documentation. One can get close
to understanding but in order to make it work there is no way around
paying someone. I just know because I am good with python, I can read
code and I know when things are not explained adequately. Essentially
all this stuff is a pyramid scheme, only profitable for the well
connected and/or the early adopters.
That doesn't mean that I haven't met a lot of enthusiastic and helpful
zope developers and programmers, it's just that they don't understand or
don't want to understand that money can be a show stopper for people
wanting to learn about zope.
A.
