[MUD-Dev] Re: PDMud thread summary

[Niklas Elmqvist]

It was with a small amount of glee I found this quote by Vadim, which I
have now shamelessly ripped out of its context. :) 

On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Vadim Tkachenko wrote:

> Recently I with amusement realized that a lot of developers can't
> clearly think in terms of abstraction levels. One more thing which is
> directly related to the portability (and even more, to the good design)
> is abstraction levels and modules as abstractions.

Agreed. I would argue that abstraction levels are quite important in a
complex project like this, especially one we expect others to build upon
and use as a platform for their own MUDs. That is, DevMUD should provide
some quite abstract but powerful primitives for MUD developers -- the
average Joe should not need to know about down-and-dirty details such as
the driver, threading, module management, etc except the bare bones. If we
fail to do this, then people will just continue building from scratch. 

This is also why I think some sort of bus-based message communication
system is a Good Thing<tm>. It is a quite good abstraction in that it
captures normal function calls, message queueing, RPC mechanisms and
distributed proxy calls under one concept, while still not introducing too
much inefficiency. It is much easier for a newbie developer to think of
inter-module communication in terms of "here is a channel leading directly
to this module you requested contact with" instead of having to learn the
implementation details.

Yes, you're right, I've grown even more fond of this idea. Yes, it will
take some good arguments to convince me otherwise :) (And no, I won't be
too difficult about this if people don't want it.)

> Vadim Tkachenko <vt at freehold.crocodile.org>

-- Niklas Elmqvist (d97elm at dtek.chalmers.se) ----------------------
  "The trouble with being a god is that you've got no one to 
   pray to."
		-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods