Levy Rivers's Library tagged rules → View Popular

10 Feb 09

Finally, while the administration will urge banks to increase their lending, and possibly provide some incentives, it will not dictate to the banks how they should spend the billions of dollars in new government money.

12 Mar 08

Declarative rules are the success story of end-user programming. Millions of nonprogrammers create and use them daily. But in the form of smart playlists (and their smart-* kin), they have some problems. For instance, they make it hard to fine-tune their contents. If the query for a smart playlist gets you almost there, the only way to get all there is to either tweak the query some more (add or remove conditions) or tweak some items (change them to fit/not fit existing conditions). The Chandler folk have been wrestling with this, trying to come up with a more flexible model.

Imperative rules are much more flexible. Lotus Agenda provided powerful imperative rules that could be triggered by various actions. But that power and flexibility had a price. As Agenda’s creators said, “The results of cascading program-initiated actions often surprise even experienced users…” And surprise is a Bad Thing here.

So I’m not happy with either approach at the moment. To use Adam Bosworth’s terminology, declarative rules are simple but not sloppy, while imperative rules are sloppy but not simple.