Melbourne Meetup Thursday 25th of June - Thoughtworks

[John Barton]

Hey all,

Sorry I've been slack and not made the proper announcement yet. I got
word from Dan yesterday letting me know he can't talk this month, so
the Haml-off is off.

The format for the evening will be instead:
- Me talking about the Railscamp recon mission
- Ben Schwarz's "Why Haml sucks" talk
- Pizza!
- Mike Bailey presenting Chef!
- Pub

Same bat place, same bat time, same bat channel:

Thoughtworks IOOF Building : Level 15, corner of Elizabeth and Collins
Street For lift access past 6:30 SMS Mark Ryall on (0414 740 489)

Big thanks for thoughtworks' continuing support of the group, and I'm
looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow night.

Cheers,
jb

[Clifford Heath]

On 24/06/2009, at 6:27 PM, John Barton wrote:
> word from Dan yesterday letting me know he can't talk this month, so
> the Haml-off is off.

Hurraaaaay! I was planning on coming late to avoid it.

> - Ben Schwarz's "Why Haml sucks" talk

Boooo. Can you do this first, so I can avoid it?

Luv ya Ben... but the subject isn't appropriate IMO.

Clifford Heath.

[Ben Schwarz]

Cliff,
I'll be offering an alternate view and some food for thought. As well
as a tiny' bit of smack talk.
I believe HAML has a time and place :)

I've never been pre-boo'd for a presentation! I'll wear a waterproof
jacket.

--

[Ben Schwarz]

My slides (with audio, thanks to Josh Basset!) are online
http://www.slideshare.net/benschwarz/why-haml-sucks-or-why-you-should-think-before-choosing-haml-for-your-next-project

[Myles Byrne]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 12:26 AM, Ben Schwarz <ben.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

My slides (with audio, thanks to Josh Basset!) are online

http://www.slideshare.net/benschwarz/why-haml-sucks-or-why-you-should-think-before-choosing-haml-for-your-next-project

Awesome. Is your next preso on "Why Ruby Sucks or Why You Should Think Before Choosing Ruby for Your Next Project". Honestly people should just learn to write better PHP.

Seriously though, here's how I think about HAML (and language quality in general): If you randomly pick a line (or even a short string) from a file, what are the chances that piece will contain a *contextually relevant* chunk of information and not just some boilerplate that's there to help the computer process the data.

There's something that's built into our psychology that tends to associate a good visual helping of metadata with "work" and "quality". This story came up on hackernews recently[1] that's kind of cheesy but illustrates the point well. I know the feeling, I'm guilty of this myself. For the longest time typing this:

  <style type="text/css"></style>

Just Felt Right. 

The part of my brain that appreciates "correctness" just overruled the part that said "there's only on style language the browser actually understands and it's going to be like that for a very long time and even when it's not that new style language will probably still have a mime-type with a preceding 'text/' ... and even when we're embedding a fancy new style language that is not text (not sure what this would even look like, base64?) then the browser will probably still try to detect CSS first because it makes logical sense to do so".

You have to conquer this part of brain, the part that sees an XML document that is 90% tags and thinks "I wonder if this validates" rather than "Where's the signal". Progress depends on it. HAML is the right direction.

-- Myles

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677655

[Clifford Heath]

Myles,

I love the way your brain works.

> You have to conquer this part of brain, the part that sees an XML
> document that is 90% tags and thinks "I wonder if this validates"
> rather than "Where's the signal". Progress depends on it. HAML is
> the right direction.

Yes, it's all about signal-to-noise ratio.

Incredible things become possible when the noise can be suppressed.

Clifford Heath.

[Chris Lloyd]

2009/6/29 Clifford Heath <cliffor...@gmail.com>

I love the way your brain works.

Please, don't feed the ego.

Chris

[Ben Schwarz]

Myles, did you listen to the audio?
I had a bit of feed back this morning from people who had not, I
believe this is probably why (I think) you missed the "point" of my
presentation?

Thanks for the insight of how your brain works :) I always knew it was
a wild and scary place.

On Jun 29, 4:25 pm, Myles Byrne <myles.by...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 12:26 AM, Ben Schwarz <ben.schw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My slides (with audio, thanks to Josh Basset!) are onlinehttp://www.slideshare.net/benschwarz/why-haml-sucks-or-why-you-should...

[Myles Byrne]

Didn't listen to the audio. Just did now. 

Seems like you had a bunch of points there ... but I'm not sure if my position would be any different. If I was building myspace (or a blogging platform) I'd probably still offer people the ability to write in haml and allow them to fall back to html if they couldn't be bothered learning haml (which is how it works in ruby/rails now). HAML, like markdown, is a superset of html. Maybe the trouble is with the tile of presentation? Maybe it should have been "Why optional abstraction layers implemented as supersets of their target output formats suck in a world where more people are familiar with original output format. And not many people write the output format properly anyway. And the output format is a standard and new stuff is happening in that standard." or simply "On HAML & HTML"

[Perryn Fowler]

As a one time co-presenter of "Every time you use Struts God kills a
kitten" I think we are getting a bit touchy about presentation titles.
:P