Re: message primitive

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj at mdj dot nada dot kth dot se>]

"Greg J. Badros" <gjb@cs.washington.edu> writes:

> The more complicated version has already taken 20+ minutes of
> discussion effort and will result in lots of effort for people using
> Guile, as well as for me to update the internal calls to use the new
> version.  The marginal benefit from doing it that "better" way?
> certainly non-zero, but probably not nearly as great as the initial
> benefits from the original suggested change.
> 
> I'm basically making an economic argument:  it'd be great if everything
> could be perfect with Guile, but it can't so we have to pick and choose
> where to spend the limited developer resources to improve it.  Although
> the hour+ this'll ultimately end up taking will make guile (N+epsilon)%
> better, the two minutes I'd already spent would've made guile N% better, 
> and freed up over an hour for me to do other things to get
> bigger-than-epsilon improvements in Guile.

It is worth 20+ minutes of discussion and a lot of work when making
design decisions about the Guile language.  The reason why Guile is in
such a mess now is that people have been reasoning like this before.

There's a big difference between what measures it takes to develop a
good language and what it takes to develop an application, or to
implementing some internal functionality inside Guile.

Remember that people may have to live with the decisions we make now
for many years to come.