Re: [Chicken-users] Grumpy comments on eggs and an idea.

[Moritz Heidkamp]

Hi Matt,

Matt Welland <address@hidden> writes:
> After a long day of work and being very much in the mode of "just getting
> the job done" I ran into the need to parse csv. Cool. I know that there is
> an egg for that. After installing the csv egg I looked at the documentation
> and my heart sunk. This was not an egg written for mortals but for scheme
> Gods, something I am not now nor ever will be. I thought that perhaps the
> Chicken 3 egg (which I knew to be usable by mere mortals) would compile
> under chicken 4.X and went to dig for the code but on the way I happened
> across the eggs page, odd, what is csv-xml? It sounded complicated but
> proved to be the old, easy to use code! Add "(use csv-xml) and a single line
> of code (csv->list ...) and I was done.


I found myself in exactly the same situation recently. Unfortunately,
csv-xml was not yet available back then so I went with Ruby as I was in
"just getting the job done" mode, as well. Ivan, maybe you could change
the egg documentation to be a bit more elaborate, e.g. explain the
example a bit? Or how about adding some pre-made convenience parser
fuctions that can be parameterized by passing arguments? Alternatively
we could just add a link to csv-xml saying something like "if you don't
have any special parsing needs see the csv-xml egg".


> This gave me an idea for an enhancement to the eggs page. How about adding
> tags to eggs and a mechanism to filter on the tags at the top of the page?
> I'm not suggesting that this is a high priority but maybe something that
> could be added the next time those pages are refactored.
>
> Some useful tags might be: application, alpha, beta, production, advanced,
> for-geniuses-only

I think there is a tag mechanism in the wiki already, not sure how or if
it's used though.


> Oh, and thank you to both the csv and csv-xml egg authors. Even though I
> can't easily figure out how to use the csv egg I'm certain it is very
> elegant and powerful and although the name threw me off I very much
> appreciate the continued availability and simplicity of the csv-xml
> egg.

I concur, thanks for the great code guys!

Moritz