Meta-question about FLEx : blank-slate verses strait-jacket

[John Hatton]

I didn't want to dive in too soon and spoil things.  Once it's clear that a
former designer of FLEx is a long-time RNLD-list member, folks might
miss-out on the fun of anti-FLEx analogies, which I've enjoyed.  I even
appreciated Marks' thinly- veiled jabs at the Christian faith of FLEx's
developers :-) I have lived in PNG for so long, with so many Australian
friends, that I (almost) appreciate the ribbing. In your culture, this means
we're friends, right?  There's been some constructive criticism, too.

 

I do hope everyone had a chance to read Beth's reply, which addressed the
inaccuracies of the original post.  I would be sorry if folks passed on such
ideas as that FLEx isn't open source (you're confusing it with Toolbox),
that it isn't for non-linguists (confusing with WeSay?), that it's
impossible to collaborate, or that it's still large and slow (it was largely
re-written for speed and size over 2010).  What is clearly true is that web
presence could be improved in order to make the facts more clear. 

 

But with those misunderstandings cleared up, I hope we can get on to the
valid concerns and thoughtful questions in Claire's post. There are still
some things in FLEx which will make it unattractive to many (no Mac version,
requires clean consistent data on import, pre-Himmelman orientation, limits
to interoperability, intentionally not a blank-slate like Toolbox).  I'd be
happy to talk about any of these.  For now, I'd like to write a bit on this
trade-off -between something which is more of blank slate and something
which embodies some basic concepts in order to help with automation.

I'm not sure what Claire meant by saying that FLEx was for "non-linguists",
but maybe I agree after all.   Software design best-practice calls for
identifying a core "persona". Others, below and above that persona can still
use the program, but they aren't the target the designer holds in mind.  For
FLEx, the target audience is not PhDs or PhD candidates, who appear to make
up the bulk of folks on this list. FLEx's core target persona is required to
do a broad but often necessarily shallow amount of linguistic description as
part of his job. We want to give him tools which guide him along, even at
the cost of flexibility.  He benefits from a more guided system than would a
Linguistics PhD candidate intensely researching one aspect of a language.
As the trailer-park analogies have shown, that researcher will trade a lot
of pain for the flexibility he/she needs.  Hence the continued popularity of
SIL's Toolbox among western academics, while so many outside that group have
eagerly switched to FLEx.  And some western academics too, even on this list
(they're too smart to come out of that closet here J ). 

 

Users of FLEx appear quite enthusiastic about it, compared to when they were
always fighting with Toolbox, creating big messes of inconsistently
organized data that they had trouble publishing or repurposing.  They don't
care that their data is now in XML, but I do.  They've forgotten how easily
their data became a mess when they used Toolbox, but I haven't (because I
still help people convert once in a while). I'm convinced that data about
hundreds of languages are now on their way to long-term usefulness, data
which would have otherwise been lost. I'm convinced we've "lowered the bar"
for our target user, even while agitating some others (who can still use
Toolbox). So we accomplished at least part of what we set out to do.
Partially. In several ways we failed, and what's more, there are important
goals we should have had (back to Claire's post), but didn't. I'll get to at
least a couple of those in my next post.

 

In writing all this, I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to sell FLEx to
this audience (I may try to sell WeSay or SayMore to you someday, if I'm not
too scared).   While a firm advocate of SIL's "Service to all" creed, I
recognize that the more beyond-target-persona users FLEx has, the more
support & enhancement requests the team must field, all for free. 

 

Instead, I'm writing in the hopes that we do have a constructive
conversation addressing Claire's questions, with the goal of helping people
understand their own choices as consumers of linguistic software, and to
help us as a community of users and developers make good choices about
future directions.

 

Cheers,

 

John Hatton

SIL International Language Software Development, PALASO <http://palaso.org/>
, and SIL Papua New Guinea <http://pnglanguages.org/> 

 

 

 

 

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