[KinoSearch] Re: Wildcards

[Nathan Kurz]

On 2/11/08, Marvin Humphrey <marvin at rectangular.com> wrote:
> I think what's in those docs is pretty coherent, and
> manages to fulfill the high-level requirements.  The Query-Weight-
> Scorer hierarchy is here to stay, methinks, and that's what I wanted
> to cover.

Hey Marvin ---

I think you are going along a good path here, and that fleshing out a
couple of these examples would be very useful, both as tutorials and
to determine if parts of the API need refinement.  For a simple (and
self-serving) example that would make me happy, I'd love to see a
setup that scores Boolean queries purely by the weights given by the
user: Or's return the highest subscore, And's multiply.

As to the fitness of the Query-Weight-Scorer system, you're probably
right to want to keep it.  But I think you can do a lot to tidy it up
and make it more comprehensible to newcomers.   Instead of writing a
detailed description of each method on each object, I think you'd get
more benefit out of a solid high level overview.  I'm a firm believer
that an easy to explain architecture will be both easier to maintain
and easier to improve.

Father C (and lurkers), I think it would be great if you could write
up your overview as well.  Even if you haven't poked around all the
innards in depth, you're much closer to the way it works than most
users will ever be.  So without reference to how it actually works,
write up something describing how it should work.  I think that
understanding how potential users intuitively view a problem is great
step toward providing them a solution.

Nathan Kurz
nate at verse.com

ps.  Marvin, I apologize if I'm coming across as too much of an
armchair critic lately.  I'll send you some ice cream one of these
days.  While I haven't been writing much code, the ice creams getting
to be really tasty.