Marshall wrote: > Joe Marshall wrote: >> That's the important point: I want to run broken code. > > I want to make sure I understand. I can think of several things > you might mean by this. It could be: > 1) I want to run my program, even though I know parts of it > are broken, because I think there are parts that are not broken > and I want to try them out. > 2) I want to run my program, even though it is broken, and I > want to run right up to a broken part and trap there, so I can > use the runtime facilities of the language to inspect what's > going on. > > >> I want to run >> as much of the working fragments as I can, and I want a `safety net' to >> prevent me from performing undefined operations, but I want the safety >> net to catch me at the *last* possible moment. > > This statement is interesting, because the conventional wisdom (at > least as I'm used to hearing it) is that it is best to catch bugs > at the *first* possible moment. But I think maybe we're talking > about different continua here. The last last last possible moment > is after the software has shipped to the customer, and I'm pretty > sure that's not what you mean. I think maybe you mean something > more like 2) above.
Nowadays, we have more options wrt what it means to "ship" code. It could be that your program simply runs as a (web) service to which you have access even after the customer has started to use the program. See http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html for a good essay on this idea. Pascal -- 3rd European Lisp Workshop July 3 - Nantes, France - co-located with ECOOP 2006 http://lisp-ecoop06.bknr.net/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
