On 13 Jul 2010, at 20:12 , Paul D. Fernhout wrote: > Anyway, in that sense, could FONC be seen as trying from a computing > perspective to address "The Pleasure Trap" of technology leading us, > counter-productively, to ultimately be drowning in endless make-work code and > tons of fancy but unneeded widgets? And where the end result of that pleasure > trap of all the eye candy or syntactic sugar is that we are ultimately worse > off than if we stuck with simpler systems, like, say, an extensible Forth > command line? :-)
Smalltalk, evolutionary psychology and Forth, how can anyone resist? Thank you for a great read Paul! Quoting from Leo Brodie's excellent "Thinking in Forth": -- We asked Moore (Chuck): "How long should a Forth definition be?" A word should be a line long. That's the target. When you have a whole lot of words that are all useful in their own right -- perhaps in debugging or exploring, but inevitably there's a reason for their existence -- you feel you've extracted the essence of the problem and that those words have expressed it. Short words give you a good feeling. -- When practicing deeply the wrangling of projects with millions of LOC it is very easy to get stressed out around the questions surrounding a platonic definition of 'simplicity.' Questions such as "how do we define a downward trajectory?" or "which direction is simple in?" or even "how can we even possibly hope to measure simple?!" I don't think those questions have an answer as long as we are asking: "Can we write tools that let us practice the kind of 'Computer Science' or 'Software Engineering' that produces millions of lines of code without ending up with complex code?" Much like I think there is no answer to the question of: "How do I change my diet so I can keep eating too much without getting fat?" On the other hand, this question may well have an answer: "Can we write tools that reduce the complexity of the models we use to describe the object of our Software?" Okay, so the answer to that question is usually a blunt: "What you meant to say is: 'Sir, please may I write some tools...' and the answer is: 'No! You may not!'" Or to bring it back to t-shirt slogans: "That bastard Kepler did nothing to solve my epicycle problem." - antoine ps. Make no mistake. Paul is right on the money. Even if no-one wants to 'fess up most of us _are_ being measured (implicitly) on SLOC. Our managers may use different words. But the effect is the same. 'cos the cause is the same! :-) _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
