Emergence of Grok

[Anton Vredegoor]

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.