On Dec 17, 2004, at 7:47 PM, Avi Bryant wrote:

> On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 11:00:49 -0800, Tim Rowledge
> <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> Flow is A Good Thing. As always, the hard part is persuading a large
>> group of people to adopt something new, especially since it is a
>> replacement not an add on. I don't see any particular problem with
>> replacing all the prims, especially since they're in plugin(s) but
>> getting package owners to rewrite to use new streams and so on....
>> I've never been able to think of a way round that part.
>
> I've advocated this in the past without any success, but I might as
> well try again: the way to get people to adopt Flow is to make it
> possible for them to use it side by side with the existing streams, so
> that they can migrate to it incrementally without anything needing to
> be broken during the process.  All this means, I think, is prefixing
> Flow's classes so that they can coexist in the image with the old
> Stream implementation.  Yes, there's something aesthetically
> unpleasing about having FlowStream or FStream instead of just Stream,
> but if adoption is actually a goal it seems a small price to pay.

I concur. One other suggestion: either have Flow use the existing 
primitives (as John mentioned) or distribute the Flow plugin as part of 
the standard VM install. No one will want to switch if it creates a 
VM-level dependency for their package.

Colin