Re: message primitive

["Greg J. Badros" <gjb at cs dot washington dot edu>]

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