In the spirit of Open Dialogue - Avoiding the - Yet another Plugin?

[Scott_Sauyet]

@TW_Tones

I do not code in JavaScript, I always try to use TiddlyWiki native solutions first, If I can’t do it in tiddlywiki, I consider TiddlyWiki in need of enhancement or fix to the core. That is I only revert to Javascript as a temporary solution, and ideally only to fill a gap, on the path to improving the core.

I am, although a long-time user of TW (since 2004 or 2005, I’m pretty sure), I am still a novice at anything more than doing the basics. And although I consider myself a sophisticated JavaScript user, I’ve never reached for JS doing it.

@TW_Tones

In my view needing to write a Javascript solution is often a failure, either in my skills or tiddlywiki features, with notable exceptions such as introducing a whole library of features.

Maybe I’ll come to feel that as I get to know the community and the intricacies of TW better, but that seems an overreach. Most users of almost any system, and I’m sure that includes TW, are casual users. They use it as I did for years as mostly a note-taking application or some such. But if they want to go further, they can do what I’m doing now: trying to write a fairly complex wiki taking advantage of many more TW features, and trying to learn them as they go. Or they can try to find plugins and other tools that help them through their very specific problems. But once they start trying to do a bit more, they may well turn to the tools they know well, and if that’s JS, then it wouldn’t be surprising if they use it first. That’s not a failure of theirs; it’s logical to proceed with what you know. And it’s not a failure of TW or its community, except in how difficult it might be to find the information that would make it easy for them to do otherwise.

@TW_Tones

With all due respect to our contributors with JavaScript skills, I hold the view that many quickly revert to JavaScript when they would be better, contributing to filling gaps in the TiddlyWiki core. Which is unfortunate because core modifications often require JavaScript coders.

I hope to get knowledgeable enough one day to try this. I’m quite sure my JavaScript skills are up to snuff (I sometimes teach classed on advanced JS.) But I’m not even close yet with TiddlyWiki. I need to understand what it does and how to use it before I look at that.

All this is to note that I’m not ready to contribute to core, and while I haven’t yet reached for lower-level JS techniques to achieve a current goal, it could happen, and I don’t think I would feel at all that either I or TW had failed.

In the thread that seems to have inspired this, I brought up passing arrays of objects to a macro simply as a parallel that I would expect most developers to understand. I was not at all looking to code this in JS.

---

BTW, as a native English speaker, I didn’t have any reaction to “yap” in earlier versions of the message or its title. I’ve used a number of YA* tools over the years, and I understood it from the first mention of “Yet Another Plugin”.