Re: [Openinteract-dev] has_many progress

[Chris W. <ch...@cw...>]

> On Dec 1, 2004, at 2:58 PM, Vsevolod (Simon) Ilyushchenko wrote:
>>>  my $book = Book->fetch(42);
>>>  $book->publisher    == object (whether manual/lazy fetch)
>>>  $book->publisher_id == ID
>>>  $book->author       == list of objects (whether manual/lazy fetch)
>>> Is that right? Because it sounds from the discussion as if:
>>>  $book->publisher    == sometimes ID, sometimes object,
>>>                         depending on the configuration
>>> which IMO is very confusing.
>>
>> Yes, yes, yes! My point exactly!
>
> Aw, c'mon Simon ... I thought I'd convinced you on this one too. Now I
> have to convince Chris too?  :-)
>
> Chris, have you gotten through our whole previous discussion? I think
> I've explained why I think this is NOT confusing (at least to me :-)  I
> can try to restate my reasons if you think it would help.

I believe I read through everything. I just think you're overestimating
how much time and effort people are willing to spend to sort these out. We
who have been using SPOPS for a while see the relationship between the
configuration and the code as blindingly obvious.

But for new people -- or even people who only use SPOPS occasionally --
it's not. And the idea that the behavior of an existing method could
change based on configuration is very disconcerting. People like to think
of their objects as somewhat stable -- even Perl people! -- and when we
change the meaning under the hood like that it's untrustworthy.

OTOH, the idea that something *new* happens -- like adding new methods --
as a result of configuration changes isn't so bad because you have the
choice if you want to use the new feature or not.

Chris

-- 
Chris Winters (ch...@cw...)
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.