On 20 Jun 2006, at 6:16 pm, Kamen Nedev wrote:

Another topic which has been cropping up lately, and which you no doubt have thought about it (somewhere in the back of your brains, when not too busy hacking at this or that bundle) is the following: How can a resolutely closed-source application like TM attract such an open-source-like community environment? Does it have anything to do with software architecture (a closed framework with an open approach to extensibility through bundles), or with Allan's social skills?

No offence to Allan's social skills (although he is remarkably pleasant on this list for such a busy man), I think it's the bundles. In my own software development career, I've found that extensible- plugin-architecture applications exude this almost irresistible flexibility; you're not just looking at a fixed-purpose tool that will become the bane of your life if you want to do something that exceeds its "mental model" - you're looking at something that, by being able to extend it in a Turing-complete language, really is a modular component you can build into anything that would benefit from it.

It's a very different mindset.

ABS

On 20/6/2006, at 19:16, Kamen Nedev wrote:

[...] quote, "TextMate-like snippets (snippets.el)"...

And for vim users: “This file contains some simple functions that attempt to emulate some of the behaviour of 'Snippets' from the OS X editor TextMate” -- http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php? script_id=1318 :)

I believe this one even imports property lists :)

[...] How can a resolutely closed-source application like TM attract such an open-source-like community environment? Does it have anything to do with software architecture (a closed framework with an open approach to extensibility through bundles), or with Allan's social skills?

I think Mats Persson suggested it could be my minor in psychology which allows me to carefully play this game of double standards ;)

Seriously though, my guess would be a combination of having it be a very customizable app in nature, i.e. it really invites you to customize, then having a user base mostly of geeks who do like to customize things, and lastly provide an infrastructure to cooperate/ comment on these things (svn, rss feed for the change log, mailing lists, and irc channel.) -- and of course being present myself in this infrastructure.

Though I agree with Alaric Snell-Pym in that alone the fact that it is customizable does bread end-user innovation, regardless of what the developer does. I believe there are also very enthusiastic user groups e.g. for Photoshop who writes cool extensions, even though Adobe is probably a faceless cooperation to most.

But no matter what it is, let it be absolutely clear that I am grateful for the community which exists around TextMate -- especially since I use a lot of functionality written by other users :)