On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 22:04 -0400, Jacques Carette wrote: > shine. Though wire+connectors view of software architecture is > 20 > years old (at least in the theory world...). Fiadeiro's "Category > Theory for Software Engineering" has a nice chapter on that.
So does my text-book by RFC Walters "Categories and Computer Science" (1991) .. in fact the whole book is about that viewpoint, and there are even some underlying papers (I believe Walters invented the multi-graph, there's a paper in Australian Math. Bull somewhere on it). The idea of digital circuits is not exactly new: nor are simulators for them, which is chips and wires modelling where the chips model actual chips :) But as a way to do low level systems programming -- eg implement a web server -- in a general purpose language -- well the idea may not be new, but a general programming *paradigm* isn't a theoretical aspect of software (see Object Orientation and Structured Programming) -- its a *Marketing* aspect. > Anyways, the main thing is: make sure programming with circuits in Felix > is more compelling that doing the same in Simulink. Borrow their good > ideas. Fix their stupid ideas (like the 12 o'clock rule). I can't fix stupid ideas I don't know about :) > And remember one thing that we learned the hard way (on a doomed project > at a company I used to work for): do NOT try to find a circuits analogy > to classical imperative programming -- it's a fool's errand. There's no need: Felix is a traditional imperative language with a strong functional sub-component. Chips are just actors (OO world view), or Sprites (Gamers world view). > Solving > higher-level problems which did not embody a natural "control strategy" > was on the other hand well-suited to circuits kind of thinking. In particular, simulations and real time cellular automata -- the most compelling example of the latter being management of cellular telephone networks .. :) What's actually lacking is network transparency (code mobility). An Erlang-Felix fusion would be an interesting system. -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net> Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Felix-language mailing list Felix-language@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/felix-language
