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Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

monitorstxt.org

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Re: Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

#71

Post by [deleted] »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #64
fleitz wrote: post #50

English is an incredibly crappy language for writing tight specs in. The only appeal of english as a programming language is that people who cut big checks speak it. It's completely inappropriate for expressing formal logic. The problem is when people think "Hey, I have a computer science problem. I know, I'll express that problem in English!" and now they have two problems

Only until they "parse" the English using regexes. Then they have three problems. Four if you count "there are lots of trivial variations on the correct English phrasing, but none of them work, so you have to refer to the exact grammar anyway, this just made it bulkier."

[deleted]

Re: Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

#73

Post by cheald »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #64
fleitz wrote: post #50

English is an incredibly crappy language for writing tight specs in. The only appeal of english as a programming language is that people who cut big checks speak it. It's completely inappropriate for expressing formal logic. The problem is when people think "Hey, I have a computer science problem. I know, I'll express that problem in English!" and now they have two problems

Only until they "parse" the English using regexes. Then they have three problems. Four if you count "there are lots of trivial variations on the correct English phrasing, but none of them work, so you have to refer to the exact grammar anyway, this just made it bulkier."

That's my exact gripe with Cucumber. It's basically just regex soup that's designed to make other people think that you just feed raw intent to your computer and it divines the correct behavior. I honestly don't see how it adds actual value, when Ruby is already so damn readable.

Re: Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

#74

Post by eliot_sykes »

merlincorey wrote: post #70
ricardobeat wrote: post #39

I'd much rather have something akin to an appcache.manifest file: # monitors.txt - see http://monitorstxt.org for more info GET: http://monitors.txt http://otherservice.monitors.txt POST: http://monitors.txt/service q:lalala user:trololol http://monitors.txt/service2 id:250 RESOLVE: monitorstxt.org 207.97.227.245 PERFORMANCE: http://duckduckgo IMO feature testing should be part of your test suite pre-deploy, not the…

This syntax seems a lot less confusing and more powerful than the subset of English presented. Another bit of syntax that I think is missing is something like: GUAGE: http://domain/stats/logins 60s COUNTER: http://domain/stats/logins 60s AVG: http://domain/stats/logins 24h Something like this would allow you to setup not only with simple external monitoring systems, but with internal systems like Nagios, Ganglia, Zen…

Interesting, incorporated this into the YAML sample: https://github.com/eliotsykes/monitorstxt/blob/gh-pages/moni...

Re: Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

#75

Post by eliot_sykes »

Put up some ideas for what yaml, xml, and json formats could be:

Cucumber https://github.com/eliotsykes/monitorstxt/blob/gh-pages/moni...

YAML https://github.com/eliotsykes/monitorstxt/blob/gh-pages/moni...

JSON https://github.com/eliotsykes/monitorstxt/blob/gh-pages/moni...

XML https://github.com/eliotsykes/monitorstxt/blob/gh-pages/moni...

Re: Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

#76

Post by minhajuddin »

cheald wrote: post #73
prodigal_erik wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only until they "parse" the English using regexes. Then they have three problems. Four if you count "there are lots of trivial variations on the correct English phrasing, but none of them work, so you have to refer to the exact grammar anyway, this just made it bulkier."

That's my exact gripe with Cucumber. It's basically just regex soup that's designed to make other people think that you just feed raw intent to your computer and it divines the correct behavior. I honestly don't see how it adds actual value, when Ruby is already so damn readable.

I've tried using cucumber a couple of times and failed, and I knew there was something wrong with it. Thanks for pointing that out.

Re: Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

#77

Post by cheald »

minhajuddin wrote: post #76
cheald wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my exact gripe with Cucumber. It's basically just regex soup that's designed to make other people think that you just feed raw intent to your computer and it divines the correct behavior. I honestly don't see how it adds actual value, when Ruby is already so damn readable.

I've tried using cucumber a couple of times and failed, and I knew there was something wrong with it. Thanks for pointing that out.

Lots of people like it, so I'm sure that there's an argument to be made for it, but it feels unnecessary and crufty. Personally, I think that the strongest case for it is that it lets your manager without any technical ability feel like he's a useful part of the process, but it just seems like a solution in search of a problem.

Something like Steak (https://github.com/cavalle/steak) feels far more comfortable and readable to me.

Re: Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

#78

Post by nickand »

People can't even agree on one programming language even though they all manipulate the same bits. Now we have a monitor.txt. So you are telling me that the site simply existing and being up is not enough to satisfy it's state of being up? Keep making extra crap people and you dig your own hole.

Re: Monitors.txt - lazy webapp monitoring

#79

Post by dextorious »

dextorious wrote: post #28
politician wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about this -- don't you use APIs which use largely, if not universally, English identifiers? Or is there a version of, say, the .NET Framework where the API itself is written in French, German, or Spanish? Or what language has a custom parser for each language so that you can write keywords ("if", "for", " do ") in your native language?

He means of "English, the natural language", dummy.

Downvotes?

1) Friends of the parent poster? 2) People thinking "dummy" might hurt one's feelings? 3) People willing to accept needless pedantry when what was meant is obvious? 4) People that also think that the original comment was against english keywords?

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