(2009-11-21) Dent Tiddly Web Framework Philosophy

Chris Dent noodles on his thought-process in reaction to people trying to treat Tiddly Web like a Python Web Framework. I personally have not spearheaded development along those lines because it is not the way I, personally, prefer to work. I work via a process of decomposition to comprehensible and distinguishable parts. I then make, as independently as possible, those parts. Later I compose those parts, plus parts from other people, as required, in different and exciting configurations. Those "parts" are usefully black-boxed for me but at the same time extremely flexible in how they can be used. I work like this because I come out of the UNIX tradition. 20 happy years of me working with small tools doing small, fairly specific, jobs. All these tools composed in fun and flexible and ultimately extremely powerful ways... It is clear there are plenty of people who do not work this way. In my efforts to understand the differences I've looked for parallels or patterns. What I've found is that the people who seem to get my method easily come out of a Unix administration or systems programming background or are just Unix naturals, whereas the people that struggle are traditional OOP-based developers (with a preference for inheritance and identification by class rather than composition and identification by behavior), developers raised on Ruby On Rails/PHP or other start-you-from scratch frameworks, or just plain non-Unix people.