Might & Magic

"Twiki is a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform and knowledge management system." as directly pinched from the project's site.

We tend to believe that "powerful" mostly means "mighty" as "it has some overhuman capabilites that makes life unbelievable easy for us, that all we have to do is sit back and watch the process while sipping our delicious fruit coctail or whatsoever...".

Does "powerful explosive" fit to this description?
I guess not. In general cases, "destructive" is much more suitable.

What if we narrow the context from "general" to "mining" in the example above? Now we are talking about a useful tool which might hand one's ass to them in pieces when used without care.

Context is important when defining problems and solutions.

Twiki is powerful when it comes simple everyday operations that one can expect from a wiki for document management. When more (where controls and programing take place) is desired, it turns out that the mighty tool is indeed a powerful one that should be handled carefully. If not, then the days of hell begins.

I've spent a few weeks to get some simple forms working, where generally 10-20 lines of code done in a few minutes would be enough. I broke some pages. I got lost in documentation where vast amount of information lays around. I've hardly been able to understand that some paraghraphs that I've ignored as "wtf is this crap, where's the info?" were the data i've been looking for.

After enlightenment hit, i was still so far away from the solution.

Well, this rant is not about Twiki specifically, nor i am the one to comment it. I just want to criticise man's everlasting quest for "all-in-one that does it all and all and even all".

Well..uhm.. No!.. There's no such thing in real life, just get over and forget it already..

Allmighty is a fictional character from the worldwide bestseller series called Religion where "might" only comes from "magic".

Unlike the fictional character, when us humans try to have an allmighty solution, we just end up with useless crap or magical things that works somehow and only a chosen few can handle.

Twiki is a good example for this case. I am not one of that lucky few.

Learning the underlying magic took my weeks, and the best part of it is I have nowhere to use and profit from the experience i got. Lost time is lost.

Sigh..

Why can't we just have small lessmighty things, and make them collaborate when more is needed?