Demo Lua Wiki

["Matthew M. Burke" <matthew@...>]

All,

I think Yuri and PA have made a good point about the wiki (and this 
could perhaps apply to the website as well).  Take a look at 
ruby-lang.org --- it's built with a CMS called Radiant which is 
programmed in, you guessed it, Ruby.  Php.net is programmed in, again, 
you're correct, Php. Squeak.org is powered by, yes, you are an 
over-achiever, aren't you: squeak!  Python.org is programmed in, wait, I 
can hear you about to chime in..., Python?  Well, I assume so.  But I've 
not been able to find anything that explicitly says that.

It's more than just marketing, however.  And it's not an outbreak of NIH 
syndrome.  I think there is a lot of value to "eating your own dog food" 
--- as several people have mentioned.  Several years ago, before it 
crashed and burned, I worked for a company called Ars Digita (aD).  aD 
built web sites for customers using a toolkit that we developed.  We 
used the toolkit ourselves to run our company intranet.  And (IMNSHO) 
that was critical in helping us really understand our customers (not 
that we necessarily always delivered well...). (*)

The only real point, however, is that I have storage and bandwidth to 
host one (or a couple) of pilot lua wikis stuffed chock full of the info 
that's on the existing (and not broken...) wiki.  Contact me off-list if 
you want to take advantage of me (urr, I mean my offer...)

Matt


(*) A funny story which you can skip if you're busy and important:  At 
aD you couldn't even be interviewed until you had done "The Problem 
Sets" and had your submitted code deemed suitably impressive.  You can 
find the problem sets at http://www.eveandersson.com/arsdigita/ (look at 
the 3.x psets, not the Java crud).  One of the psets involved designing 
and implementing an on-line system for reserving conference rooms.

Now I believe I was roughly employee 100 when I was hired.  So that must 
mean we had roughly 100 different implementations of an on-line room 
scheduling system built with our web toolkit (which we all claimed was 
the hottest thing since sliced bread).  I happened to be in the lobby of 
our main office in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not the real one :) when 
our leader, Philip Greenspun (of Greenspun's tenth rule fame: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_Tenth_Rule), came through 
with a couple of potential clients.  He stopped at the receptionist's 
desk and asked her to reserve the main conference room.  Whose version 
of the on-line room reservation system did she use?  It would of course 
fill me with pride to answer "mine."  Sadly, the answer was nobody's.  
She pulled out a pencil and a notebook.