Re: [Userops] Userops Acid Test v0.1

[Dave Crossland]

Hey

Thanks Chris! Your article says,

5. Scriptable
Not everyone should have to work with this layer directly, but everyone benefits from scriptability. Having your system be scriptable means that users can properly build interfaces on top of your system and additional components that extend it beyond directions you may be able to do directly. For example, you might not have to build a web interface yourself; if your system exposes its internals in a language capable enough of building web applications, someone else can do that for you. Similarly with provisioning, etc. 

Working with the previous section, bonus points if the GUI can "guide users" into learning how to work with more lower level components; the Blender UI is a good example of this, with most users being artists who are not programmers, but hovering over user interface elements exposes their Python equivalents, and so many artists do not start out as developers, but become so in working to extend the program for their needs bit by bit. (Emacs has similar behavior, but is already built for developers, so is not as good of an example.)

I'd like to suggest "Self Extensibility" as a key feature of this aspect.

I think Emacs, Blender and Firefox are huge success stories for libre applications, and each owes much of its success to not only the ease of scripting, but the core application design emphasising modularity: Emacs has a 1% core in C, and 99% is in Lisp, making it 'self extensible.' Firefox has also traditionally followed this model with XUL-based AddOns, but is now self-destructing by requiring AddOns to use a limited API [1]. Declarative UI toolkits are important for this approach. 

Also the composability of the microservices pattern is also supportive. 

[1]: http://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-changes-firefox-apis-developers-unhappy/

Cheers

Dave