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From: jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen)
Subject: Re: Ousterhout and Tcl lost the plot with latest paper
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Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 12:07:12 GMT
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ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com (John Ousterhout) writes:
>  For example,
>there is a real-time Tcl application containing several hundred thousand
>lines of code that controls a $5 billion oil well platform and (much to
>my shock) it seems to be quite maintainable.
> [...]
>The oil well application
>actually subdivides into a whole bunch of small tasks, so it's really
>more like 500 smaller programs.  Also, if the application is
>fundamentally gluing (i.e. the complexity is in the interconnections)
>then switching to a more strongly typed language will just make things
>worse.

I find this very hard to believe. With languages like Python or Tcl, with
no interface definitions whatsoever, you can only *hope* that you use
every interface correctly. I work on a largish project in Python, and
the one thing that gives continuous headaches is the lack of interface
definitions. Whenever you change an interface it is very very
difficult to check that you haven't inadvertantly broken something.

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