Not so fast, all you have to do is sprinkle some .net dust on the computer and everything will be fixed until the next time MS changes their mind, right?
Sorry, couldn't resist. Ironically, I find that software written to MS specs breaks readily; things written with anything up through contempt for them seems to work just fine. I stop short of seeing a vm as allowing one to run Windows in perpetuity, but that is another debate. I frequently want things both ways. I want the rest of the world to stand still (except when I want something fixed<g>) so I can get on with my work, and I generally expect that my code will evolve such that the most recent version is the best I know how to make. It is unlikely that I would be brave enough to run old versions of my code in the same image with new stuff, but if you can make that work to serve all of us, have at it :) Bill -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcus Denker Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 4:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Gardening/ScriptManager On Jan 26, 2010, at 10:30 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote: > Stef, > > Are you describing something that allows different versions to coexist > in one image? Unless that's the idea (and I'm not sure I'd want to do > that??) Yes! At least I want that... we once described it like this: Backward compatibility is the enemy of forward evolvability. Nevertheless, we cannot live in a world where the old is ignored. An often overlooked property of software is that new systems can simulate the old, and the recent trends in hardware virtualization have shown that simulation of the old is far easier than for the new to stay compatible. A snapshot of an old Windows machine can run on a virtual machine forever, whereas keeping an operating system compatible forever is bound to fail. Programming languages for evolving systems should provide backwards compatibility in the same way: we need a first class description of the history of all code of the system, freeing the present from being compatible with the past while at the same time providing the possibility to go back in time easily. The system should provide complete, runnable snapshots of itself at any point in the past. Our work on changeboxes forms one first step towards this goal.... Oscar Nierstrasz, Marcus Denker, Tudor Gîrba, Adrian Lienhard and David Röthlisberger: "Change-Enabled Software Systems," Challenges for Software-Intensive Systems and New Computing Paradigms, Martin Wirsing, Jean-Pierre Banâtre and Matthias Hölzl (Eds.), pp. 64-79, Springer-Verlag, 2008. http://scg.unibe.ch/archive/papers/Nier08bChangeEnabledSoftware.pdf The ChangeBoxes work is here: http://scg.unibe.ch/scgbib?query=Denk07c&display=abstract Marcus -- Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD. _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
