The Care Factor

The Care[O]Meter is one of the more unusual ideas behind The Goo - it is tied to the idea of the Emotional Programmer. A purely dry software construction memory isn't fun. I want a Memex with feelings.

That said, I have reservations about including it in the ALPHA release. One technical downside is it relies on a MySQL database which is a hefty prerequisite. A conceptual downside is it relies on the 'Care Factor'. We all care about different things while programming and it is presumptuous of me to expect that my fellow programmer will care about the same Things.

Hmmm. This is an important subsystem which I definitely want to share and I think advances the prior art. So does it stay or does it go?

I've decided it has got to stay but it means I'm going to model the "Care Factor" really *simply*. Here's how: any DatabaseThing that has a "care_factor" column gets juggled by the Care[O]Meter. No care_factor means it will never appear on the horizon of your Care[O]Meter. It also means you get to set the care_factor which means I don't have to worry about making you care about the same Things I do.

OK. That's decided then.