[Biococoa-dev] BCSequence class cluster

[Koen van der Drift]

On Jan 8, 2005, at 8:36 AM, Alexander Griekspoor wrote:

> Yes, and I'm afraid that although it would be informative to have 
> others mix in the situation, I'm afraid it will lead to more 
> discussion but less decisions. I think we should be careful with 
> dropping the ball somewhere else with a simple "what do you think?" I 
> would propose to invite people to have a look that we already know and 
> ideally are both in Biology and Cocoa/BioX projects. We all know a few 
> people like that I guess.
> Look at the impact that the involvement of Charles has!
> For example, I could invite Serge Cohen (Serge if you're reading this, 
> I'll let you know why I send you this email ;-) to share his opinion 
> (he's somewhat more from the informatics than from the bio side in 
> contrast to most of us), or I could ask a guy from Apple I met at the 
> WWDC if he has suggestions. If we all do that, I think it would result 
> in more constructive discussions than simply asking on cocoa-dev.
>

I think that is a really good idea, Alex. Since all of us have a 
science background, and not an programming background, it could well be 
that we completely miss an important issue, or make things too 
complicated. We all know how much we are struggling with finding the 
most usable design for BCSequence et al. Although it is good to think 
of the user's approach, I also think we need to have a solid base, that 
we can build all our ideas on top of. As soon as we have the base, 
adding biology and chemistry extensions shouldn't be that difficult 
anymore. One other thing would be alignment coding. This has been done 
by many other programmers, and we shouldn't waste our time and efforts 
by trying to reinvent the wheel. Of course we have to do thing the ObjC 
way, not just blindly copying some cool approach from one of the other 
BioX projects.

Regarding new developers, a quick search for biology/molecule on the 
CocoaDev users list shows a few names: Charles (we all know him by now 
:),  Julan Blow (http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?JulianBlow), and Todd 
Harris (http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?ToddHarris). We could see they 
are interested to join. On the other hand, more developers -> more 
opinions -> longer discussions -> less coding :)

cheers,

- Koen.