[elephant-devel] Elephant success story

[Dan Knapp]

   I thought a little praise for this project was in order.  I'm a 
teacher by
profession, and our school is doing report cards now.  And, like many
schools, we want a system that keeps bits of text to be re-used in
different places, as appropriate... it requires a database.

   I spent about four days trying to put something together with MS
Word's mail merge.  I got 90% of the way there, but the things I
couldn't make work were important.   Each little thing I added
broke something else, which then needed hours of debugging.

   With the deadline bearing down, I took a chance and started again
from scratch, using OpenMCL with Elephant, and generating TeX
output.  It took just one night - about eight hours - to make the whole
thing!  Then I was able to incrementally add features over the next
couple days.

   It was great being able to just treat database objects like any other
object.  It lets you do incremental development in true Lisp style.
Working with an SQL server allows something similar, but of course
with Elephant one keeps all the generality of Lisp.  Elephant was also
much easier to set up, and I can move the database from one
machine to another easily, which turned out to be important.

   I do wish the :recover option to (open-store) were documented
somewhere - I needed it at one point, and didn't see it mentioned
anywhere until I looked in the source.  But it worked perfectly once
I did find it.  If you don't document your features, nobody gives you
credit for them!

   So, thanks!  Elephant was very useful, and I can think of a couple
personal things I'm going to use it for in the near future.  Kudos.

-- Dan Knapp