[pmjordan]

Will you maintain Mongrel forever?

With all due respect, this seems a ridiculous question. Do you obtain written statements to the above effect from all maintainers of software (open source or otherwise) before using it? Yes, it'll have to be maintained, but Zed's article alone is more documentation than you could ever hope for from most programmers. It's clear he isn't "most programmers" but that's no reason to hold him to ridiculous standards.

[rbanffy]

I am not holding him to ridiculous standards. It's obvious he won't maintain Mongrel forever. What I am confronting him is with the fact that he may be able to navigate any arbitrarily clever construct he invents, but that future maintainers who inherit Mongrel may not be as capable.

Again, it's his project and he's free to do whatever he feels like with it. Heck... I am not even a user. I offered him advice he is free to disregard. The fact my cleverness has been biting me ever since my 6502 days (quite likely before Zed was born) is a problem I sort of learned to deal with long ago - but it still comes to bite me from time to time.

[pmjordan]

While we're at it, let's lobby our governments to ban all software innovation!

Seriously, I bet the operating system you're using relies on far more of that evil "cleverness" than the subject of this thread.

This whole thread reeks of thinly veiled ad hominem attacks to me.

[rbanffy]

Zed tends to do the ad-hominem part very well without any need for external help. And you are using a straw-man. I never came even close to advocate for banning all software innovation.

What I said, and repeat, is that if you want to introduce an expensive to maintain piece of code, you have to weight the added cost against the performance gain. In this case, the performance gain seems marginal, the assumption of usage envisioned seems wrong and the added complexity seems just pointless.

It's his project, his code and I am not even a Mongrel user. I offer this as a friendly piece of advice, from old programmer to young programmer.

You know: it doesn't matter if you are beam-racing a 6502 or writing networking code to run on 64-bit deeply pipelined processors, there are things that remain true. This is one of them.