On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 11:57 AM, David Barbour <dmbarb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Loup Vaillant-David > <l...@loup-vaillant.fr>wrote: > >> On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 04:17:48PM -0700, David Barbour wrote: >> > On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 1:44 PM, Gath-Gealaich >> > In real systems, 90% of code (conservatively) is glue code. >> >> Does this *have* to be the case? Real systems also use C++ (or >> Java). Better languages may require less glue, (even if they require >> just as much core logic). >> > > Yes. > > The prevalence of glue code is a natural consequence of combinatorial > effects. E.g. there are many ways to partition and summarize properties > into data-structures. Unless we uniformly make the same decisions - and we > won't (due to context-dependent variations in convenience or performance) - > then we will eventually have many heterogeneous data models. Similarly can > be said of event models. > > We can't avoid this problem. At best, we can delay it a little. > I should clarify: a potential answer to the glue-code issue is to *infer* much more of it, i.e. auto-wiring, constraint models, searches. We could automatically build pipelines that convert one type to another, given smaller steps (though this does risk aggregate lossiness due to intermediate summaries or subtle incompatibilities). Machine-learning could be leveraged to find correspondences between structures, perhaps aiding humans. 90% or more of code will be glue-code, but it doesn't all need to be hand-written. I am certainly pursuing such techniques in my current language development.
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