Steve Dekorte wrote on Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:33:37 -0700 > On 2010-07-11, at 06:18 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: > > It isn't > > about making it smaller (though I also love that - ColorForth is one of > > my favorite systems) but making it understandable so it can be built by > > humans in such a way that it can become vast. Like the Internet. > > That's a good point. I'd encourage the development of a *measure* of it. > With measures we can iterate. The speed of the feedback loop is only > as tight as our measures. Consider the last 40 years of language/tool > development vs hardware speed (which can be measured) improvements.
I don't know how to measure scalability except by growing something until it breaks. One complication is that is things grow, they tend to become more valuable and so more resources a poured into evolving it so it can continue to grow. At some point you get diminishing returns, but such things usually go way further than you would have initially guessed. Of course, none of this helps if you want to decide which of A and B is the more scalable option. Obviously the thing is to try to identify the most critical bottleneck. For high performance computing, for example, there is the "roof line" model which takes into account memory bandwidth and floating point performance under different operating conditions: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.156.756&rep=rep 1&type=pdf The lack of scalability that I was talking about is where a system becomes too much for any person to understand. Though lines of code is very simplistic, Alan has compared code sizes of various projects with different kinds of books in a few of his talks. There are texts that almost anybody can read and there are others that nobody ever will. Certainly you can't understand something you have not read. So that is one bottleneck. I bet there are others - even in a system that is reasonably short there might be too many combinations of elements to understand: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
