Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Article on ACS x Zope
The choice items he chooses to shoot down are pathetic. Most ACS users knows dozens of work around for each Con he can discover.
The question is should I feel sorry for him and worry if he will anger Py folks, getting no help in the future for web authoring system he choices to use.
The ACS community is much larger than a "bunch of tcl kids" that he can push around with a few choice insults in the playground. I hope he give more systems a real try instead of writing advocacy pieces that even Python devotees won't want to be caught seeing their coworkers writing.
The ACS community is growing by leaps and bound--much like the Linux community--this may result in newbies who both advocate for and against ACS with ignorance. Ignorance is not bad as long as you sit down at the end of the day and really boot up and learn something. That's what I learn as a ACS newbie. To learn from the right people. Learn to filter out the crap though is difficult, I produce crap myself, but I am learning.
Give Kevin a break, the ACS system is not as hard as he thinks, and in time he will try to work his way through the problem sets and learn all that he needs to learn.
Perhaps he will never find merit in using a full RDBMS, but at least he will know exactly why in the far future. There's plenty of discussion that explains both side of the story at Web/DB forum (he should really READ--not just said he read them already)
Perhaps there's no merit to keeping Tcl, ACS, and web authoring so simple that although you can't drag and drop, you'll find all the things you normally can't drag and drop in the programming world are a breeze to understand--without more than a week long boot camp for a non CS student or adult. But at least he knows he can always refer people boggled with object relational databases, XML, and object oriented programming to ACS and really sink their teeth into the work flow. If he and a select few well trained CS kids are hacking away at a site, I have no problem with him being disgusted with Tcl and Perl. Each language in the world have their fans and "haters". That we can never change. But I don't find his advocacy methods worthy of praise. Detail discussion by both hot and cold headed people about the pros and cons of Python, Perl, and Tcl will not fit on a DVD drive and are sprinkled all over the net, I have bookmarks to each of these issues and I love all the inputs, but I dare not summarize them as recklessly as Kevin did, he is doing a disservice to people evaluating both Zope and ACS in my opinion.
In my opinion, you will do yourself a big favor to just install the damn thing (OpenACS or Zope) and try it out for yourself. And ask your manager who else might want to use the system. And when you find out so many people in your organization will want to use the system--ask yourself if you can teach all of them to get up to speed immediately. That's the true power of tcl--bar none. Since ACS is associated with Tcl now (instead of say ASP or Perl or Py) we'll have to learn to live with the warts and benefits of the language. And that universally easy to learn and live with syntax of tcl is a real plus.
