My boss sent me the Microsoft Research paper on mutability annotations yesterday,
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/170528/msr-tr-2012-79.pdf I've been writing distributed parallel code in Erlang for several years, now, and the immutability of functional data is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient, to make things work. So I expect that they can annotate their C# with all this mutability markup, making it incredibly ugly and incomprehensible in the process, and that it will work, sort of, some of the time, for limited circumstances. Probably better than hand built multi-threaded code, but probably not as well as well crafted Erlang trees of supervised processes mutating state via tail calls. Managing mutability only prevents you from making certain classes of egregious errors, it doesn't solve everything, it just enables you to continue. We're very successful clock makers as a species. As long as all the parts of a mechanism are connected together into a causal graph, so we can twiddle this part and see what it does, then we can work things out and make wonderfully complicated clocks. Hence we make really awesome electrical power generation stations, huge electron factories of enormous complication. But, when we connect our generators together into grids, we have a history of oops where a squirrel or a tree and an unforeseen causal connection takes millions of dollars of clocks offline in a few minutes. We fix the problem, and it happens again in a different way. We understand how to engineer the generator, because it's a clock. We're still learning how to not engineer the grid on the fly, because it's a parallel distributed system which only works like a clock when it wants to tease us. -- rec -- On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 12:49 PM, glen e. p. ropella <g...@tempusdictum.com>wrote: > > Does anyone have any insight to share about this? > > > http://developinthecloud.drdobbs.com/author.asp?section_id=2284&doc_id=255275&; > > -- > glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
