Re: [Metacosm-dev] Still alive

[Cyril Hansen]

Hi all,

I have been unemployed since mid-May of this year, and expected to put a 
reasonable workload behind metacosm, even if i have some other 
tasks/interests of higher priority. It seems I over estimated my free 
time, as we always do.. Anyway, I am still interested and able to put 
out some time (at least 6 hour / week) in the project, and probably more 
if we have a good objective...

If i still believe in the pertinence and the validity of the project 
ideas, i recognize i feel frustrated for some reasons :

- I agree with Elkine that Java seemed cleaner and easier than C++ in 
the beginning, but in the end it is not so clear.
As for networking; I met exactly the same type of issue he talks about. 
This and the 'proprietary" taint of the Java platform explains the lack 
of 'core', teenager like hacking with Java. Java is a tool from a big 
company for other big companies. I appreciate to have the word written 
all over my CV, but as a software dev experiment, it is maybe not the 
tool required. Java IDE are very heavy beasts, even if something exist 
for emacs.

- I feel frustrated when licensing issues requires me to do work not 
technically needed and even sometimes technically unsuitable, even if I 
agree that serious software development must cope with it, be it 
commercial/proprietary or free. Some people cheat with that, but it is 
simply not acceptable to do so with free software as everything is done 
outside where everybody can see everything. Maybe we should consider it 
to be just another one dev project constraint. The problem is maybe that 
we did not take it into account from the beginning...

-  The current project  dev is too slow and 'heavy' : There is  too 
much  'framework' like code, that gives very few functionalities today. 
Adding any small 'core" features require refactoring a lot of code : 
This is bad for short dev cycles. There is a moto for this very problem 
: "Design for today, not tomorrow", which is part of the Extreme 
Programming propaganda. I discovered this dev methodology in 2002 and it 
now makes me feel bad about our code base. I can speak about this more 
later and I have some books to hand out.

- (geek) Public interest is raised with  screen shots,  playable  beta 
versions, continuous improvements and fixes, and innovative concepts.
We had a lot of innovative concepts, but could not achieve the other 
points. Even if we do not achieve the whole thing in two years of team 
development, we need to have a software base that is easy to try out, at 
least on a usual linux system, that is fun to try out,  and  some screen 
shots  that  helps people understands  what  our 'innovative concepts' 
are all about. The interest we can gather from such work is  probably  
only what  we need to  be motivated to go further. And the  small 
publicity can also have  side  (good) effects like  make it  easier to 
work in the multimedia  domain,  etc.


I vote to keep the domain, and I would prefer it to belong to an active 
project member.

Regards,

Horus / Cyril M.Hansen