On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 04:17:28PM -0800, Brian Harvey wrote: > But to me it's a dialectic. Both are /necessary/. Both are /indispensable/.
Isn't it becomming hard to tell them apart? Agile programming methodologies are becoming tactics of choice not just for web sites, but for deeply-embedded-must-never-fail systems. It just works better, and the simple fact is that most of the time you can't know how to specify the outcome until you've had a few goes to see what you can achieve. > Here's another metaphor. In my car, as in all recent cars, there are a bunch > of computers. Some of those computers control the fuel injection, the brakes, > the air bags. I want those computers programmed by R6RS fans. I'm never > going to buy one of those third-party ROMs to make the car go faster than the > manufacturer intended. On the other hand, there's also a user-interface > computer, that, among other things, decides when to turn on the air > conditioner. I hate how it's programmed! And I'm really frustrated at my > inability to fix it. I want /that/ computer to have a Scheme REPL! What I don't understand is why having some nicely defined meaning for "finished" programs should preclude a useful semantics for "work-in-progress" programs (REPL). Can't we have both? Please? I want to be able to use scheme both to code my embedded real-time compute engine *and* for the interactive control and extension protocol. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me, but maybe there's a catch? > Our side made plenty of mistakes. (I still have, somewhere, Greenblatt's > paper arguing against swapping from memory out to disk -- when the memory > filled up, you just shouldn't let any more processes run.) That's not such a bad idea. With the disparity between cache, RAM and disk speeds these days, if your system starts to page (heavily), it's effectively crashed anyway. Thanks for the anecdote, BTW. Cheers, -- Andrew _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
