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Re: message primitive
Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@mdj.nada.kth.se> writes:
> "Greg J. Badros" <gjb@cs.washington.edu> writes:
>
> > The more complicated version has already taken 20+ minutes of
> > discussion effort and will result in lots of effort for people using
> > Guile, as well as for me to update the internal calls to use the new
> > version. The marginal benefit from doing it that "better" way?
> > certainly non-zero, but probably not nearly as great as the initial
> > benefits from the original suggested change.
> >
> > I'm basically making an economic argument: it'd be great if everything
> > could be perfect with Guile, but it can't so we have to pick and choose
> > where to spend the limited developer resources to improve it. Although
> > the hour+ this'll ultimately end up taking will make guile (N+epsilon)%
> > better, the two minutes I'd already spent would've made guile N% better,
> > and freed up over an hour for me to do other things to get
> > bigger-than-epsilon improvements in Guile.
>
> It is worth 20+ minutes of discussion and a lot of work when making
> design decisions about the Guile language. The reason why Guile is in
> such a mess now is that people have been reasoning like this before.
My point is still valid... you can't take a ton of time to make every
little decision.
> There's a big difference between what measures it takes to develop a
> good language and what it takes to develop an application, or to
> implementing some internal functionality inside Guile.
I'll grant you that the tradeoff between up-front costs and long-term
benefit is very different for a library and language than for
applications.
> Remember that people may have to live with the decisions we make now
> for many years to come.
Only if we have time to do the big things to guile to make it survive
for years to come. :-)
Greg