Topics and Traits

I remarked in passing on Swhack that unison feels a lot like cvs in its organic design and lack of consistency, that for cvs was cleared up a lot in its successor, svn. Were unison to have a more consistently designed successor, I proposed that it should be called nosimo, since svn contains two thirds of cvs backwards and then the remaining third has a kind of phonetic similitude; if you forget to keep one side reversed.

I've done that kind of odd wordplay before, for Pient, which is based on a concatenation of the reversal of N3 with T; P for Plus and I for Inverse. The overall "Pie" prefix also harks back to the Pie website that Sam Ruby set up as the birthplace of what is now Atom. I had a look at the old wiki, a Moin Moin setup which is still pretty much mothballed from the time that Atom development moved to the IETF, and noticed a few traits which I had missed before, especially due to my recent exposure to Tiddly Wiki, via Cody.

With CamelCaseWikis, there's a tendency for the names of pages to focus around a topic or pattern, in the pattern language sense. The ESW Wiki even resides under /topic/, which seems a good choice until you realise the limits that this imposes. For example, there was a reference to InvisibleHands in the Pie wiki, which is not a topic I'd expect to generate much discussion other than a simple definition. I wondered whether this small amount of data deserves a page to itself, or whether it wouldn't be better structured by tagging paragraphs with a topicaliser. How you'd create larger ordered documents out of such a system I'm not sure—it seems orthogonal to that.

On the other hand, were I to maintain a wiki I'd like it to be very topic based, because I think that it's useful for generating and capturing such things. I'd just really like to be able to also publish things independently of that, just as documents whose topics wander or doesn't really conform to the whole design pattern scheme, and better yet to enable smaller amounts of data with traits such as the topicalised note on InvisibleHands, which seems like something that the Tiddly Wiki at least partially fosters.

My use of the word "traits" comes, incidentally, from experimenting with Perl6 and finding that the readline function didn't work as expected (it would read the whole file), so I had to use a trait to get it to work: for =<test.txt> { FIRST { print } }. The problem may have been due to Cygwin and Windows fighting over line separators; using a Windows build of pugs, for some reason the filehandle iterator protocol seemed to recognize a line feed without a carriage return as a valid separator whereas the readline function didn't.