Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: A modest proposal

[Bill Page]

On 6/29/07, Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> Literate programming can currently be seen as religion. Even though TeX
> survived until today, there must be some reason why a lot of people
> don't follow it.
>
> I must say, I am happy that Tim set LP as a main goal for Axiom. I think
> it is an important one.
>
> But not only from Tim's and William's mails I learned that it should not
> be the only goal. Following LP too strictly, does not work. At least not
> at the moment. Currently, more important than LP is the need to attract
> more developers. Currently, the rules that everything must per properly
> documented should be a bit relaxed. Axiom currently is not documented
> properly and it will not be for another 10 years. We have a lot of
> legacy code.
>
> But without new and ambitious developers, Axiom will become even more
> uninteresting. Axiom must spread to the world and attract users and
> developers. If you set the entry barrrier too high. Axiom is going to
> become a Tim-only project.
> ...

I agree with both Ralf and William Sit on this issue. Like Ralf, I
think that I am a strong supporter of the *concept* of literate
programming, but that the experiment in literate programming as
defined by Tim Daly in the current Axiom open source project is (for
the most part) a failure. And I do not think that this is simply
because insufficient effort has been devoted to developing this part
of the project. Or rather I should say it the other way: insufficient
effort has be devoted to literate programming in the Axiom project
*because* the current approach to literate programming in the project
is a failure. I think the Knuth-style literate programming (pamphlet)
methodology is just not suitable to the task.

But I am not sure what to do about this. I think that already the
Axiom project has suffered a very significant and maybe even critical
lose of interest on the part of other possible contributors at least
in part because of the insistence on this approach. It complicates the
build environment and puts a extra layer between the developer and the
system. It is clear that developers do not want to be reading their
source code from a dvi viewer, two steps removed from the problem on
which they are focused. And at the same time the raw pamphlet format
source code is even more awkward and obscure than the original
"illiterate" source code by the interposed presence of coding and
documentation which is normally otherwise "out of the way".

These comments (by me, Ralf, William and others) should *not* be
construed as in anyway being against documentation or even against the
concept of literate programming. But as Ralf says, we have to face up
to these uncomfortable facts or risk the death of the Axiom project
due to placing a barrier which no developer other than the one who
originated the idea is willing to climb.

Regards,
Bill Page.