Mark,

On Thursday, January 30, 2003, at 02:36 PM, Mark S. Miller wrote:

> At 11:27 PM 1/29/2003 Wednesday, Robert Withers wrote:
>
>> Mark, I would like to thank you for this significant commitment you
>> have made in engaging us with your ideas.
>
> Hey, no commitment! Just a strong desire. I'll do what I can. ;) ;)

:-)  since you put it that way, thank you for your posts.


>> However, I like the challenge and reward of your fourth level of
>> ambition.  It requires several orders of magnitude greater of a
>> community commitment.
>
> Perhaps, but I don't think so. I think the tradeoff is instead how 
> similar
> SafeSqueak is to Squeak, and how much Squeak is ported to SafeSqueak 
> rather
> than tamed or rewritten. I think what is simply unachievable, no 
> matter what
> level of community involvement, is to achieve the forth level with a
> language that is only painlessly different than existing Squeak.

How would it be different?  Where would it hurt?  I can imagine that it 
would be a beautiful engine, asynchronously sending messages and making 
sure things synchronize later.  Events from the external system would 
just be another message send into the image.  You wouldn't need an idle 
loop.  You could schedule the message sends based on cost feedback.  I 
don't have as good a feel for what SafeSqueak would feel like, though.

Well, it wouldn't take a community commitment, of course, but it would 
require some core group of enthusiasts.   I think they are out there.  
:-)


>
> As for effort, I think the tradeoff is the other way around.
>
> "Simplicity is the unavoidable price which we must pay for 
> reliability."
>                        -- Tony Hoare.
>
> Doubly so for security. Given a change of basic architectural 
> principles, it
> is often easier to start over than it is to retrofit. Again, doubly so 
> for
> security.


Well, it has that burn the diskpacks feel to it, and that's a plus, i 
believe.

I look forward to the next episode.  :)

cheers,
rob