HI all, thanks much for this discussion, very interesting.
Just a preamble: I am certainly a tech enthusiast, have limited programming background (stopped around the point when Turbo Pascal incorporated object-oriented programming)…and love home automation when it just does things…i.e., not in my face, it simply works, as one would expect it for any given situation. Now, the last is the tallest of all orders of course. In the context of this discussion, I would just add the following remarks from a user perspective.
Maybe my biggest problems in following along and learning a new skill is a combination of overhead and short-hand writing style. Keep in mind that my day job has nothing to do with computers more than email and MS-Office…and I am not every night fiddling with OH or even thinking about it. Just to make it clear, I understand that somethings are simply difficult, no matter what, and I will not even start talking about date/time issues; while very relevant to home automation, I understand why this has a mind-boggling complexity.
A little more down to earth, for example, the syntax of timers, or lambdas is still a mystery to me…what exactly needs to be before the “|” and what after and why? and do I need to declare a new variable for this, is it a function, etc? And this is despite the efforts of many to explain this to newbies over and over on this forum…I read many of these posts…but, for me there is nothing that makes much sense.
Reading up on kotlin a little (thanks @diyha) intrigued me immediately as it makes intuitively more sense to me than say, Java. Reading design patterns (thanks @rlkoshak, you just will be my hero forever) are critical, as abstract concepts come to life.
At a higher level, I understand that OHs DSL is here to stay for a while…so be it. But at least it will not and does not help me a lot. It is easy to write simply rules in it (but then simple is always easy), but it gets quite more complicated quickly; and the only real source is the forum…but try as I might, I am still missing posts that are relevant to my problems, just because, I am traveling, cannot read every day, etc.
Sometimes I feel, that the biggest hurdle and the biggest challenge is not to write a comprehensive description on how a different ecosystem works; it is translating how this makes sense. For me, one of the entrance hurdles is alway the amount of overhead, while it is boiler-plate and trivial…I am struggling a lot before I am recognizing it as such, and then cannot help the feeling of “why do I need to type this if it is all boilerplate and standard”, because at the end of the day, I still have to learn every line…
So, I guess what I want to say is: computer languages are always logic…duh…and always make perfect sense…double duh…but few are ever intuitive, or have just a too high barrier of entrance to read up on call definition boilerplate language, on syntax that is close to Xtend or Java (because it can use all the libraries), but then not because…what as if in my case, I don’t know Java or Xtend…then I have to read up on both.
This was not a rant: home automation is not easy and I will be forever grateful about the time that all the knowledgable people put in to help guys like me understand better…and there are many, many on this forum…really thank you so much. I learned so much from all of you, and I still have so much to learn.