[DGD] just out of curiosity

[Par Winzell]

I don't remember you from eight years ago. This is still a curious 
email. It reads to me as fundamentally a complaint that Felix is busy 
writing a driver and not particularly interested in hobnobbing with you, 
oddly entwined with a minor technical diversion and some bizarre 
inquiries into Felix' personal situation.

As far as I can tell, DGD is pretty much exactly what it's always been. 
It's absolutely state of the art, and incredibly stable. It's obviously 
still being vigilantly maintained. It doesn't have lots of documentation.

I suspect Felix is still as ready as he was a decade ago for someone in 
the MUD world to actually do something serious with DGD, but we've seen 
nothing beyond a series of well-meaning hobby attempts. They're fine 
attempts, but I think your implication that it ought to be in Felix' 
professional interest to maintain an encouraging, upbeat presence on 
this list is contradicted by history. He supplies the driver. Let that 
be enough. If you feel compelled to work on the documentation, by all 
means, go help the open-source project. That's how this is supposed to work.

What "odd design philosophy" is supposed to mean I can't begin to guess.

At the end of the day, I would've been ready to respond with a great 
deal more enthusiasm to some parts of your mail, but overall it leaves a 
rather unpleasant taste in my mouth. My suggestion is that when you 
write a mailing list so clearly centered around the intellectual 
accomplishments of one man, you avoid bitching about him -- especially 
if you feel you have some previous bad history with the list to make up 
for. You come across as pretty tone deaf.

Zell



On 9/10/12 6:56 AM, RobF wrote:
> I'm wondering what the state of this driver is.
>
> It is clearly the most technologically accomplished MUD driver out
> there, but I'm wondering if Felix wants to distance it from its roots,
> given that the MUD lib that he was going to code never transpired and
> the feature-set goes far beyond what a MUD would require.
>
> And I even wonder whether he is working on DGD/Hydra under contract.
> Might not be something he is willing or allowed to divulge, but it just
> has me curious that given the decline in popularity of MUDs generally
> and DGD's historical lack of uptake by MUD developers (which may be
> argued as being for the best, as so many MUDs are dime-a-dosen clones of
> one another), and the way he plods on with it for going on two decades.
>
> During this time the lack of accessability as an actual MUD driver
> hasn't improved much except by the contributions of third parties. There
> hasn't been much interest shown in improving the documentation (correct
> me if i'm wrong), leaving the labyrinthian mailing list archives as the
> sole source of understanding the nuances of this complicated and unique
> dialect of LPC, which I don't think is ideal or user-friendly even for
> those technically inclined such as career programmers.
>
> 'Hydra' is an apt sort of name for it not just for the
> multi-threadedness but the power and potential of the system.  I don't
> know how he has the time as an obvious professional to lend his valuable
> skills to such a project unless he is the client of a high profile firm,
> or something.  Once again, not wishing to pry into what is none of my
> business, but I am curious.
>
> I myself have had a replacement kernel in the back of my head for a
> while, with at least one flagship feature I've not seen in the existing
> one.  I was going to hang onto the idea but I'm not as yet actually
> procuring the result, so by now I figure I may as well share and share
> alike and see if anyone wants to snitch the concept (or tell me it
> sucks, or has already been tried for all that I know and isn't as great
> as I think, not that I'm saying it is...).
>
> The idea being of hiding the distinction between cloneables and
> inheritables.  In the context of that-which-sits-in-the-kernel (let's
> call it the lib), it only sees a single object by a single name, and
> depending on how the object is used it will invoke an operation on an
> internally referenced inheritable or cloneable version of the object.
> The result would be a seamless illusion of their being just one object
> that can be inherited or cloned, and the maintainer of the lib wouldn't
> have to observe or remember the distinction of their being inheritables
> and cloneables.  If needs be I could describe how such a feature would
> be implemented and work but that should probably be enough to figure it
> out?
>
> The only negative I have to say about the driver is that its developer
> seems to have an odd design philosophy, or at least one that he isn't
> anxious to have the people interested in utilizing the driver (one might
> even say, 'fans' of the driver) understand or appreciate.  Or at least, me.
>
> As just one instance, he nonchalantly told me that there is no way for
> code written within the rules of the dgd-extension system to access
> objects--with no further comment, as if he had no interest in resolving
> this fact--he didn't clarify whether it was impossible to resolve, or
> just challenging for him, or if he just wasn't interested in dealing
> with it regardless.
>
> This, even though this state of affairs leaves the extension system
> outrightly broken almost to the point of uselessness, as we all know
> that the most powerful aspects of DGD lies primarily in the object
> data-type and what can be done when manipulating said object.
>
> This doesn't seem a way to attract people into using your technology, so
> from what I can gather, he doesn't care, because the people trying to
> use this as a MUD driver aren't his target audience anymore.  Maybe a
> mistaken impression, but it's the impression that I get.  It isn't
> helped when Felix also shows no lack of readiness in recommending the
> other 'more dedicated' MUD drivers out there if they don't like the way
> that things are, even though one might want the features that DGD
> uniquely provides.
>
> Not wishing to cause offense, and I hope also that the way I interacted
> in this forum in the past (8 years ago) hasn't left any prejudice on the
> minds of longer-term list-members that might affect how they perceive
> me.  Hoping just to get a clearer picture of things.  I hope my overall
> respect for the work as a technological accomplishment is seen in
> balance with the criticisms that I have, and that my comments will
> elicit some illuminating feedback or constructive dialog.
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