On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 04:22:28AM -0400, Dave Mielke wrote: > [quoted lines by [email protected] on 2012/10/14 at 16:32 +0200] > > >But at this point, why are we using C at all? If we want good design and > >maintainability at the price of performance then we should use a higher > >level > >language. Once you start repacking values into structs to make scoping more > >obvious you lose the performance advantages of using a low level language. > >And you still haven't gained the clean clarity of a high level one. > > I don't disagree with you in principle, but I do disagree with you in > perspective. > > First of all, whoever said that performance is the issue? Would it shock you > to > hear me say that performance isn't the issue? Well ... it isn't. > > Do you think that brltty is just a fun toy which runs on high-level operating > systems like Linux and Windows? Are you aware that it also runs on DOS, and > that work is underway to enable it to run within the Grub bootr loader? > There's > no way that necessarily limited environments such as those would be able to > adequately support the kinds of high-level languages which you have in mind. > > Are you aware that brltty isn't a university project? All of us who work on > it > do this as a strictly volunteer effort, and most of us have families, jobs, > etc. Why would we waste our precious time rewriting something that works, > just > ecaause it's a theoretically good idea? > > Aside from being a pointless way to be spending our time, that kind of work > would also come with the need for a great deal of retesting of code which is > known to be reliable, as well as the need to retest with all of the various > models of braille devices, each of which is extremely expensive and/or > extremely difficult to gain free access to. Additionally, we'd no longer have > any time to devote to useful work such as supporting more types of braille > devices, more host platforms, etc. Dave is 250% right. You can think of brltty as "production" software, in its way as crucial to its community as the Linux kernel; people are highly unlikely to rewrite or reinvent it for mere philosophical or aesthetic reasons, nor even for a possible slight performance increase. Not that my opinion matters in any respect on this discussion, but a better understanding of this project and community probably would help you gain insight for your project, as it seems to focus on human-machine relationships, and all of us on this list very much rely on such a relationship to lead more productive lives. :)
Just my penny's worth... Cheers, S.M. _______________________________________________ This message was sent via the BRLTTY mailing list. To post a message, send an e-mail to: [email protected] For general information, go to: http://mielke.cc/mailman/listinfo/brltty
