On Mar 2, 2010, at 3:18 PM, Andrey Fedorov wrote: > John Zabroski wrote: > the three stumbling blocks are size, complexity and trustworthiness > > How are these different? > > A small program is a simple program by definition, assuming it's expressed in > an intuitively comprehensible way.
I'm not so sure that a small program is necessarily simple. I could send a single message to an object that, by itself, seemed obvious and straightforward but which actually causes a huge cascade of messages to flow among a huge set of objects that result in all sorts of unexpected consequences to the state of the original object which drastically alters the meaning of future messages to that object. That's the kind of complexity that causes problems, IMO, and it has nothing to do with size. Perhaps another kind of example is constructing parser grammars. I've spent a lot of time looking at OMeta examples and thinking I understand it. After all, they are often short and seemingly simple. Then I sit down and try to implement one from scratch and fail miserably. Perhaps I have yet to learn the correct mental model to use when building these, but they sure "seem" small and simple when I'm not trying to write one... l8r Sean _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
