Partitioning the image (was Re: Shrinking sucks!)

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Tue Feb 15 16:17:58 UTC 2005


yeap

On 15 févr. 05, at 16:44, Cees de Groot wrote:

> On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:40:19 +0200, Brent Pinkney 
> <brent.pinkney at aircom.co.za> wrote:
>> This just seems lacking from the discussion.
>>
> Not completely - I've made the point but not in a separate posting, 
> and I threw in lots of stuff to make sure that it wouldn't stand out 
> ;).
>
> But, yes, the first discussion should be - do we need namespaces? Why 
> do we need namespaces? A lot of the discussion has an implicit 'yes' 
> to the first question and probably the second question has been 
> answered a long, long time ago but I always find it good to keep 
> asking these questions over and over again, because circumstances, 
> insights, people change.
>
> For example, coming from <uh oh...> Java, I though namespaces quite 
> logical. Python, Perl - the other languages I used at the time, also 
> have it. Then I came to Squeak and found it lacking in this area. It 
> hurt. Then I moved on to VW, and made copious use of its namespace 
> features. When coming back to Squeak, boy was I glad that I was 
> relieved of the burden of having to think about namespaces! Prefixes 
> rock compared to VW's namespaces.
>
> Now, that doesn't mean to say that every implementation of namespaces 
> is bad, but it did lead me to re-ask the question. Do we need 
> namespaces?
>
> And if I then consider that:
> a) you only need to have one Socket, and if it doesn't work, fix it;
> b) I actually don't mind prefixes at all;
> c) the way forward to really really large systems is probably 
> partitioning in processes/islands/subimages/vats/networks/... where 
> cross-partition communication should ideally be based on as little 
> naming as possible and more on abstract things like UUID's (or in a 
> completely orthogonal naming space like URL's - just an example, I'm 
> *not* proposing to replace class names with URL's ;));
> d) conflicting names can be talked about and resolved on a human 
> level. I usually prefer human solutions over technological solutions, 
> and Smalltalk's philosophy seems to be with me there;
> my current position is that we can do very well without them.
>




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list