Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Comparison of Cocoon and Frontier
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 11/9/1999; 3:48:43 PM Topic: Today's scriptingNews Outline Msg #: 12905 (In response to 12903) Prev/Next: 12904 / 12906
Jim Flanagan wrote:Frontier: keep diggin'
Cocoon: kick ass or die!
Dave Winer wrote:
I'm not sure what this means, but I like it.
The thing that's always put a smile on my face when I read "keep diggin'!" is the essential humility of it: it reminds me that the truly good tools like Frontier are organic; they live and die by the ongoing nurturing of both their immediate developers and an extended user-programmer community; they don't necessarily do everything, or even do everything they do, "right" out of the gate. In Frontier's case, it's a testament to just how good the idea of tightly joining a hierarchical object database with an outline-aware scripting language that can be extended, perhaps in extremis, with C code really is: what began as a MacOS scripting environment has become a cross-platform authoring/publishing/serving environment that also happens to know quite a bit about RPC for MacOS, Win32, and anything that speaks HTTP over TCP/IP.
By contrast, Cocoon's "kick ass or die!" comes across, in this context, like typical Java-based "we'll take over the world, so join us or get out of the way" tripe that Dave so frequently (and rightly) has occassion to complain about here. I probably like Java as much or more than most people here, but even I get tired of the constant drum-beating in that camp at times.
I guess my point here is that I like the "keep diggin'" image: the visual of lots of people not afraid of hard work, and not embarrassed to admit that it's an evolutionary, iterative process instead of a "we did it right the first time; now live with it" mentality.
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