The Zen of Tao?

Sean Woods gave a verly lively energetic romp through his vision of Tao what he calls the Tcl Architecture of Objects. My notes on what he said:

Classical trees are only half the picture. (The stuff we see plus the roots under the ground.) Usually we deal with dead trees lying on the ground. Where did we get the idea that trees have a starting point? Trees are useful for organizing dead things (dinosaur evolution slide).

Also good for tracking dead people ... well, except everyone has two parents. Maybe for org charts? The CEO the "root"? No, the board really would be (plus all those dotted-line relationships).

The problem

• Most of human understanding is wrapped around things that sit still
• Only dead or inanimate things sit still
• Humans, database records, screen elements and documents are not dead nor inanimate
• Why should we write programs that assume things are the same when we begin as when we end?

TAO is not an object system. It's not an architecture it's about dealing without one. Uses an sqlite backend.

Unused class strucutres are cheap to keep around. No class strucutre or is implied or assumeed.

Heresies/Features

• Uses incremental Tcl-like notation
• Does not honor data or method hiding
• Allows for some pretty/wonky code creating code systems
• Makes it very easy for a class to be defined/efiled in multiple places in multiple ways
• Stress the use of mini-languages for large scalable development

Why? Developed to solve certain problems with a family of general purpose web database applications.

Code is text passed into a wrapper. The wrapper breaks apart the code and populates the SQLite database. Don't need the code anymore once it is in the SQLite database.

Objects (anything carried over from method call to method call) is stored in a global array (in a namespace?). A stack tracks what object is currently employing what method.

Currently used in Linux shell scripts, Web-based Databases, and an Content Management system.

"Please still this idea. It works, it's fast, it's on easy on resources."

—Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, October 12, 2006 at 14:21