[TYPO3-50-general] OrthoScript

[Robert Lemke]

Good morning Sudara,

Am 20.05.2007 um 14:23 schrieb Sudara:

> First of all, I trust the 5.0 developers - you guys are smart
> cookies. But I have to respond:

Hah!

> Typoscript (or any language, interface to a language, or
> psuedolanguage) is actually a User Interface - We should be spending
> our efforts making it tight, consistent and clean. "How can we make
> it do more while demanding less from the user?"
>
> My hopes for Typoscript 2.0 is that we 'learn' from Typoscript 1.0 -
> it's strengths and weakness. I can understand people wanting
> uppercase 'TEXT' - let's not change the good stuff. We're smart
> enough to do that.

I agree 100% - if it's really the better way for users to write TEXT  
instead of Text we will find a technical solution. However ... see  
below ...

> Case insensitivity? Newbee's aside, I don't want to look around the
> internet and see this:
>
> 10 = text
>
> 10 = TEXT
>
> 10 = Text
>
> That sucks for beginners, plus it's 100% not-sexy.

Yes. I put my veto against case insensitivity. The rule is:  
Everything in TYPO3 5.0 is case sensitive, no exceptions please.

> Typoscript is already self-inconsistent - My personal hope is that  
> we take this
> opportunity to really think about Typoscript as the UI to Typo3 - As
> I've arrogantly pushed on Lemke before, we should use our programming
> kung-fu to do the heavy lifting and make the experience smooth and
> predictable for the user as possible. This is where Typoscript (and
> Typo3 in general) is weakest at present. We have all the feature kung-
> fu, but a lack of consistency, predictability, and smooooooothness,
> which is what we need to deliver in 5.0.
>
> I propose a toast to using our intelligence to "dumb it down" as much
> as possible for the thousands of everyday users out there. Only when
> the hardcore developers think it's stupidly easy will a normal person
> find it intuitive and pleasant to work with.

Good, now here comes my objection why I favourize "Text" and  
"GifBuilder":

   - All uppercase should be preserved for CONSTANTS. How would you  
distinguis between constants and classes?
   - I don't want to hide the fact that behind each TypoScript object  
there's a PHP object - if anyone needs
     to look things up or extend the implementation, he naturally  
knows where to look. Therefore, using the
     same case like for the class names would tighten the connection.

In general: We can discuss to allow for case insensitivity, turning  
strict mode off or turning backwards compatibility on to allow  
"TEXT". But my opinion is: Let's not start with that, let's not  
depend on that legacy if we don't like it anyway.

We can even autoconvert legacy TypoScript code to the new syntax and  
I imagine that if everybody knows it's now UpperCamelCase instead of  
UPPERCASE, there won't be any confusion.

Finally, when thinking about these changes I try to see it 2/3 from a  
TYPO3 veteran's view and 1/3 from a newbie's perspective. And for a  
newbie who probably knows any programming language, it would be just  
natural that constants are uppercase, objects mixed case and strings  
have to be in quotes.

But as Karsten said, please give me some more time for my TS document  
which we can discuss then ...

Cheers
robert
-- 
http://typo3.org/gimmefive