Subject: Re: Java is really convenient. Re: Sun thinks about switching Java to S-expression syntax: Lava From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/02/17 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3128233559196892@naggum.no> * cbarry@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) | Isn't this kinda like prototyping or "throwing the first one away", a | practice that as far as I know you do not believe in? But, I'm really | liking your advice so far. there's a nuance here that seems to get lost all the time. first, some people _believe_ in prototyping (in another language), i.e., they do it whether it makes sense or not. sometimes, it makes sense to do it. second, "throwing the first version away" is something you do if you need to, not something you should out to do, because then you'll end up maybe having to throw the second version away, too. my argument against what you're doing is that you involve yourself in low-level stuff long before you know how to do either low-level or high-level stuff. you will learn the wrong thing from this experiment and will retain whatever was reasonably simple to implement, not what is good design. simplifying the design is sometimes necessary when the cost of implementing it proves too costly. if you implement it in one of the environments at a time, you may call it prototyping. if you implement it in both, you're trying to evolve production code. this will fail. | I was imagining being able to do this in an CL though kinda like with | Java, "imagining" being the operative word. Sigh. well, maybe Java has a place in the grand order of things, but to make Java really work, I want serious protocol engine support, since the Java applet is going to talk to a server, and it'd be nice if that was using a reasonably standard protocol. as far as I know, CORBA support is not "standard" in Java, and despite it's cost and the introduction of yet another language (IDL) is the most promising way to deal with this mess. #:Erik