5 ms·

Blogs are way too simple to reinvent every few years. Wordpress is fine. Can't we move on to something more complicated than Blogs and Crud apps?

dkuntz2 13y ago
I agree, we don't need to reinvent blogging every few years, but WordPress has moved beyond just a blogging platform, and is a full-featured CMS. Blogging is no longer the main emphasis of WordPress. Were WordPress to refocus on blogging features, instead of adding lots of other stuff, that'd be awesome.
jerf 13y ago
It's just the turn of the wheel. Should Ghost succeed, odds are quite good that in about seven years, you'll be reading about how old and crufty Ghost is, held back by it's aging Node.js platform, and how some new hotness or other is coming along to give you just blogging (or whatever). To a first approximation, every web project starts life as a "clean, simple X without all that cruft". It is the destiny of most projects to follow that with A: failure or B: becoming the next pile of sludge to inspire a "clean, simple X".
- narrator 13y ago
  This is where statically typed code bases really shine IMHO. I've seen >10 year old Java code bases that are maintainable because of all the automated re-factoring that can be done to clean up naming inconsistencies and deprecate various mistakes. With dynamic languages cruft and little mistakes just keep building up till people give up trying to maintain it and want to start over.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    Automated refactoring came from dynamic languages. Just because the popular ones lack it doesn't mean it's not done. Smalltalk's refactoring browser works very well.
    - malandrew 13y ago
      I'm curious how easy it is to build automatic refactoring tools on top of a dynamic language that was not designed to support it, versus a static language that was. I reckon that the formalism enforced by static typing would provide enough vigor to greatly increase the chances that you can bolt on automatic refactoring as an afterthought. My impression is that the SmallTalk designers adopted some automatic refactoring early on because they developed their tools alongside the language and by doing so, the language informed the tools and vice versa.
      - gnaritas 13y ago
        Smalltalk wasn't designed to support it, it's decades older than the concept of automated refactoring. It is much easier to do in static languages, and doing so in dynamic languages requires code analysis at runtime. As it's always runtime in Smalltalk this fits naturally, it wouldn't be so in Ruby or Python where you're working on text files rather than a runtime.
        malandrew 13y ago
        Cool. Thanks for the clarification. Language design is something that I'm increasingly taking an interest in.
- mikro2nd 13y ago
  There is another force at work here... If you do achieve a "clean simple X" and manage to resist over time all temptation to add cruft; if your "X" really is clean simple and above all found useful by some people, then after a while it starts to look like a dead project. No new "features". Not many bugs left to fix that bother people. Sufficient means to plug in additional/variant functionality that real users need. No need to change the codebase, and not much more to say about it. So to a non-user - perhaps evaluating it with a view to use - it looks very much like a moribund piece of work. The continual adding of cruft is (partially, at least) driven by a need to be seen adding new Hot Sauce all the time.
grannyg00se 13y ago
The people behind Ghost didn't think that Wordpress is fine. So they set off to create something better and a bunch of other people also thought the idea would be better so they supported them. That all seems good to me. What's even better, you might agree, is that they are not stopping anybody else from setting off to create something more complicated than blogs and crud apps.
twerquie 13y ago
They're way too important and ubiquitous not to.

dkuntz2 13y ago

I agree, we don't need to reinvent blogging every few years, but WordPress has moved beyond just a blogging platform, and is a full-featured CMS. Blogging is no longer the main emphasis of WordPress. Were WordPress to refocus on blogging features, instead of adding lots of other stuff, that'd be awesome.

jerf 13y ago

It's just the turn of the wheel. Should Ghost succeed, odds are quite good that in about seven years, you'll be reading about how old and crufty Ghost is, held back by it's aging Node.js platform, and how some new hotness or other is coming along to give you just blogging (or whatever). To a first approximation, every web project starts life as a "clean, simple X without all that cruft". It is the destiny of most projects to follow that with A: failure or B: becoming the next pile of sludge to inspire a "clean, simple X".

narrator 13y ago
This is where statically typed code bases really shine IMHO. I've seen >10 year old Java code bases that are maintainable because of all the automated re-factoring that can be done to clean up naming inconsistencies and deprecate various mistakes. With dynamic languages cruft and little mistakes just keep building up till people give up trying to maintain it and want to start over.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  Automated refactoring came from dynamic languages. Just because the popular ones lack it doesn't mean it's not done. Smalltalk's refactoring browser works very well.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    I'm curious how easy it is to build automatic refactoring tools on top of a dynamic language that was not designed to support it, versus a static language that was. I reckon that the formalism enforced by static typing would provide enough vigor to greatly increase the chances that you can bolt on automatic refactoring as an afterthought. My impression is that the SmallTalk designers adopted some automatic refactoring early on because they developed their tools alongside the language and by doing so, the language informed the tools and vice versa.
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      Smalltalk wasn't designed to support it, it's decades older than the concept of automated refactoring. It is much easier to do in static languages, and doing so in dynamic languages requires code analysis at runtime. As it's always runtime in Smalltalk this fits naturally, it wouldn't be so in Ruby or Python where you're working on text files rather than a runtime.
      - malandrew 13y ago
        Cool. Thanks for the clarification. Language design is something that I'm increasingly taking an interest in.
mikro2nd 13y ago
There is another force at work here... If you do achieve a "clean simple X" and manage to resist over time all temptation to add cruft; if your "X" really is clean simple and above all found useful by some people, then after a while it starts to look like a dead project. No new "features". Not many bugs left to fix that bother people. Sufficient means to plug in additional/variant functionality that real users need. No need to change the codebase, and not much more to say about it. So to a non-user - perhaps evaluating it with a view to use - it looks very much like a moribund piece of work. The continual adding of cruft is (partially, at least) driven by a need to be seen adding new Hot Sauce all the time.

grannyg00se 13y ago

The people behind Ghost didn't think that Wordpress is fine. So they set off to create something better and a bunch of other people also thought the idea would be better so they supported them. That all seems good to me. What's even better, you might agree, is that they are not stopping anybody else from setting off to create something more complicated than blogs and crud apps.

twerquie 13y ago

They're way too important and ubiquitous not to.