[freedomben]

I won't disagree on usability. It has some sharp edges for sure. But

> A bright undergrad could build a superior replacement in a few months, even without AI.

Is quite naive. Canvas is not at all just a crud app. You can view the code yourself as it's AGPL

[ericpauley]

What component in particular goes substantially beyond CRUD?

[jameshart]

It is a very common error to look at a specialist piece of software, superficially consider the basic data structure it appears to have and think ‘seems simple enough. Basic CRUD app.’

But it’s rarely the case in practice.

In a sibling comment right here for example someone bemoaned the difficulty in Canvas of having two TAs simultaneously grade separate parts of the same assignment. That sounds like something that goes beyond CRUD.

But more importantly any workflow system, which an LMS will be full of, has to handle the always tricky problem of how changes to workflows affect the things that are currently in the workflow. Assignments posted in course X need to be approved by person Y; some assignments are submitted for approval; person Y goes on leave and now the approval needs to be person Z. Not a simple CRUD problem.

These are things that occur to me with only a moment’s consideration of what an LMS system might need to deal with. The actual domain probably has considerable more complexity that I can’t even imagine.

[Mezzie]

LMSes have to balance a lot of directly competing needs.

It has to be simple enough for the average person to use (both on the learner side and the instruction side) and have enough complexity to allow for a lot of flexibility in setup because every organization is slightly different. They have to support 50 million file formats and everything has to be backwards compatible until the end of time and everything has to load properly and quickly on 50 million different device/OS/browser combinations. Yes, there's SCORM as a standard, but even that is rickety, and an LMS that doesn't support non SCORM files is dead in the water anyway.

They're simple(ish) in code, and a nightmare in requirements.

[hackyhacky]

Everything you say is true, and yet it's clear you've never used Canvas.

Canvas is decidedly, not fast, fails to display even trivial files (such as source code) as well as more complex files that should just be handled by the browser (such as video), and it has a non-intuitive, verbose, and tiresome interface that would have felt old-fashioned 20 years ago.

[Mezzie]

Yes, I should have said 'in theory', because there always ends up being compromise and usually that's the thing that's chucked out first.

LMSes frankly run like shit. I don't work with Canvas right now, but every one I've used has run like shit.

However, there are reasons that the complex files aren't handled by the browser: tracking and persistence. It isn't enough to make a video file watchable, it then needs to be tracked in the same system as every other training/educational material and in the same way. If you don't care whether the students actually watch the video, then yeah, throw them a YouTube link or embed a video on a personal site or just have the LMS serve a basic embed. But being able to track video, make it mandatory, make it so that it can't be fast forwarded/people can't skip to the end etc. all matter when LMSes are used for topics that are required for compliance and regulatory purposes.

I don't disagree on the interface(s). Ours is a farce and I hate it.

It's likely that they're so bad precisely because of the simple tech and complex requirements. Simple tech doesn't mean 'easy' or 'not time consuming'. But it means you're looking for developers who have a decent level of technical proficiency (to handle the numerous edge cases and flexibility the systems demand: it's not hard but things like the data structures need to be well thought out and every single piece of the system is integrated with one another in most LMSes so you can't silo work as easily) and who want to work on problems that aren't hard and require dealing with a lot of unreasonable people (in the form of their requirements). You have to allow/design for a lot of stupid things because otherwise people will throw tantrums about it.

Then on top of that, you're developing something that doesn't directly generate profit, so nobody is going to pay for it or appreciate the work you put in.

Then on top of THAT, they're fairly insulated from the actual end users.

It's just a recipe for shitty software.

[hackyhacky]

I think you are confusing the reality of Canvas with a different, theoretical learning management system.

In reality, Canvas does not have workflow and does not prevent race conditions in grading. I can certainly imagine an LMS that does these things, but Canvas does not.

It would probably help if you had actually used Canvas before trying to convince us that it is non-CRUD.

[jameshart]

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to defend Canvas, so much as give general advice that ‘I could build this in a weekend’ is rarely a wise claim. The specific ways in which Canvas could not be built in a weekend do not need to be the ones I identified.

[freedomben]

You are still wrong. Just look at the code. As mentioned before, it's open source. Here I saved you a google search: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

[hackyhacky]

"Look at the code" is not a reasonable response to "Is this app CRUD or not?" You've already been asked to provide specifics about which componenent(s) of Canvas are allegedly non-CRUD, and simply repeating your claim without answering the question does nothing to advance your case.

It's a simple question. Since you claim to be an expert on Canvas, I'm sure that you can point me to the relevant features much faster than I can sort through thousands of lines of code, looking for the one line that says "def not_crud_function()". CRUD or not-CRUD is a judgement about the purpose of a program, not its implementation.

[freedomben]

"I don't want to glance through the code, I'd rather you write me a detailed report on all the thousands of places where it deviates from crud" (not a direct quote) is not at all a reasonable ask.

And If you can't be bothered to take 2 minutes to click through some pages on GitHub, I don't believe you'd take the time to even read that report. So no, I'm not doing your research for you.

Edit: I will do this for you though. Here's Gemini's opinion[1]. It's quite accurate as well, and goes into reasonable high-level detail (though doesn't get into specific modules). I especially loved this quote:

> At its absolute lowest level, almost all web software boils down to pushing state to and from a database. But calling Canvas LMS "just a CRUD app" is a bit like calling a commercial airliner "just a metal tube with wings."

[1]: https://gemini.google.com/share/142d4b2662d7

[hackyhacky]

I thought this was pretty hilarious:

https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/pull/2630/changes/...