Nonspam
[Part of a discussion of the need for enforcement of modularity in
programming languages]
From: tlb@trevorblackwell.com
To: Jonathan A Rees
cc: paulgraham@yahoo.com, kanderson@bbn.com
Subject: Re: oop
> This is related to Lisp being oriented to the solitary hacker and
> discipline-imposing languages being oriented to social packs, another
> point you mention. In a pack you want to restrict everyone else's
> freedom as much as possible to reduce their ability to interfere with
> and take advantage of you, and the only way to do that is by either
> becoming chief (dangerous and unlikely) or by submitting to the same
> rules that they do. If you submit to rules, you then want the rules
> to be liberal so that you have a chance of doing most of what you want
> to do, but not so liberal that others nail you.
>
> In such a pack-programming world, the language is a constitution or
> set of by-laws, and the interpreter/compiler/QA dept. acts in part as
> a rule checker/enforcer/police force. Co-programmers want to know: If
> I work with your code, will this help me or hurt me? Correctness is
> undecidable (and generally unenforceable), so managers go with
> whatever rule set (static type system, language restrictions, "lint"
> program, etc.) shows up at the door when the project starts.
It's worth distinguishing a third category of programming
environments: one where a solitary hacker uses many open-source
modules written by various folks. I consider this a very good
environment, unlike pack programming. But it has some requirements in
common with it. Various languages succeed or fail dramatically in
making this work smoothly.
In C/C++, I find I can almost never use other people's stuff
conveniently. Most have some annoying requirements for memory
management, or use different string types (char *, STL string, GNU
String, custom string class), or array/hash types, or streams (FILE *,
iostream) or have nasty portability typedefs (int32, Float).
CL has fewer such troubles since it has standard memory management &
string/hash/array types, but there are often nasty namespace
collisions or load order dependencies, especially with macros.
Most chunks of CL code I've seen (which are mostly PG's) won't work
without special libraries, which have short names and are likely to
conflict with other macro libraries or even different versions of the
same macro libraries.
Perl packages work pretty well, because everyone agrees on how basic
types like string, stream, array and hash should work, and the normal
use of packages avoids any namespace collisions. I don't think I ever
had a open source Perl module break something. I guess Java also
prevents conflicts, but you have to give up an awful lot to get it.
The huge assortment of open source Perl packages testifies to the ease
of writing them. I've taken a few packages that I wrote for my own
purpose and found it very easy to make them self-contained and
contribute them. Usually, people only write C++ libraries for very
large projects, and it requires a different programming style from
what you'd use for your own code.
Anyway, I suggest that Arc's modularity features should be designed to
support use of open-source modules in single-hacker projects, not to
support pack programming. This suggests, in addition to what CL
already has:
- that modularity be a convention (CL, Perl), not something enforced
by the compiler (Java). Sadly, I find the CL module system way to
cumbersome to actually use. It has to be convenient enough to use in
ordinary programming, not a special thing you use when you're writing
a module for external use.
- there be a sufficient basic library that everyone won't have to
write their own basic library. I'm talking about the sort of functions
from On Lisp like last1, in, single, append1, conc1, mklist,
flatten. If everyone has their own, then you have to package it up
with any code you publish (making it awkward to publish) and it'll be
hard to read other people's code with different definitions of basic
functions.
--
Trevor Blackwell tlb@trevorblackwell.com (650) 776-7870
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