Inbetween MVVM and gohaml

I had planned on putting up another post when Monday rolled around, one that continued the MVWTF discussion I started last week. My friend, Ed, reported that the post seemed incomplete because I dropped the MVVM ball. I couldn’t help but agree.

On Sunday, I started the MVVM post. However, it has run away from me. Far, far and away. I have put about 12 hours of work into the post and I’ve only half completed it. This has not resulted from an immense amount of content; rather, it has resulted from trying to create precise content. To quote Dr. Andre de Korvin, “We must lose precision to make significant statements about complicated systems.” Well, I ain’t losing no precision, here, so my significant statements take longer.

Not like this stream-of-consciousness post.

Competing for my attention comes some requested work on gohaml, my Go-based implementation of the HAML template engine. As time passes, more people have expressed an interest in using it. Which causes a problem because it kinda sucks.

Yeah, that’s right. I wrote some sucky software.

Not in terms of functionality. It works just fine. But, the source… yuck. Furthermore, it has some real extensibility issues.

I want to make it better. I want to make it work well for these fine folk that would like to use it. I want to make it easy to change so that the project collaborators can participate. Which means I need to relearn Go. Because I haven’t touched it in two and one-half years. Version 1 has made some nice improvements; however, I have lost touch with the language. I have lost touch with how to program it.

That’s why I both love and hate my open source projects. I love it because other people get to use it. I hate it because, unlike Ayende, I have competing interests to coding.