[117] in java-interest
Re: Premature freezing of designs?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Stiehl)
Thu May 25 14:42:09 1995
To: java-interest@java.Eng.Sun.COM
Date: Thu, 25 May 95 11:12:24 -0700
From: Greg Stiehl <stiehl@bart.netjunkies.com>
I have to second Scott's concern. Premature freezing is how we ended
up with at least one really disgusting construct (union of pointers)
in PEXlib. The reason you put stuff out early is to find and *fix*
problems that are hard to find without actually using the system.
-greg.
----
Greg Stiehl
stiehl@NetJunkies.Com
http://www.NetJunkies.com/stiehl
| In the discussion of + as a string concat operator Arthur van Hoff
| (avh@eng.sun.com) writes:
| ...
| > Anyway, the discussion is a little
| > bit futile because it is too late to change (there are oodles of Java
| >code out there now).
| >
|
| First, although I think any of several proposals are better than "+"
| (primarily because of it being the wrong precedence), I also really
| don't think that this string concatenation/conversion issue that I seem
| to have stirred up/reawakened is in fact all that big a deal one way or
| the other.
|
| However, I find the statement above rather disturbing on a more general
| level. Please tell me that this was just an off the cuff remark and
| not indicative of the design team mind-set.
|
| The world is littered with systems that are painful in one way or
| another because known problems were not fixed in order to preserve some
| (early, and in retrospect small) base of code. Xt comes to mind
| immediately, as does the requirement for tabs in make. You may think
| there is a lot of Java code out there now, but I think its just a drop
| in the bucket compared to what will be out there in a year, much less
| two.
|
| PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, do not start freezing parts of the design(s)
| because of the existing code base. I know you guys have been working
| on this for a lot longer than we have seen it, but you have at least a
| *few* more months to make the changes that have merit whether they break
| existing code or not. Changes may be costly for us now, but even small
| improvements will pay back a much larger community much more later.
|
| Scott Hudson
| http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Scott.E.Hudson.html
|
| -
| Note to Sun employees: this is an EXTERNAL mailing list!
| Info: send 'help' to java-interest-request@java.sun.com
|
-
Note to Sun employees: this is an EXTERNAL mailing list!
Info: send 'help' to java-interest-request@java.sun.com
