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. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
