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Philosophy

Note

By philosophy we mean ‘how we set about doing things’, i.e. policy.

Rationale

The Liturgy of the Catholic Church is eternal.1 The form of that liturgy here below changes but slowly (except when something pretty much brand new is substituted for it). The internet is very young, and everything on it is already old. Thus divinumofficium, which is an incredible resource, is written in a declining language (perl), using a home-made database format, in a time before ‘paradigms’ were really so important, turning out hand-formatted unstructured html. Anything we write will look this way in fifteen years time: perhaps less, because Laszlo Kiss was an incredible programmer.

Summary

The websites of an Eternal Church should be old and every young, capable of serving up from their databases treasures nova et vetera, whatever the internet may look like in the future.

In Practice

If it's not documented, it's not finished.
Documentation should be readable by a tinkerer in the language in question, and thorough enough to enable complete reimplementation in the future.
Build modular tools with well defined interfaces.
The easier tinkering is, the easier it will be gradually to replace infrastructure.
Test everything which can be tested.
Tested code is less brittle code. And people might get involved in less brittle code.
Automate as much as possible.
Anything which can be run on an automation server should, so contributors only have to supply new code, and everything else will drop into place.
Plan for obselescence.
Code should die gracefully; and new code should take its place.
Document your design decisions, not just your implementation.
Including these! Explaining why a particular approach was taken is almost as important as explaining how it works. Perhaps more so, as anyone can read the code to figure out how it works.

  1. For the form taken by the sacrificium laudis here below, bound up as it is with the Sacrifice of Calvary, is temporal, but as George Macdonad put it, on Calvary the Son ‘did that, in the wild weather of his outlying provinces, which he had done at home in glory and gladness,’ and thus liturgy itself points to something eternal. ↩