Re: Design changes are done in Fedora

[Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Warren Young <wyml@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 2. Reduce the amount of effort it takes to maintain a given feature set.
>
> A lot of work has gone into that.  It’s one reason software is moving to higher- and higher-level languages.  Much of the Red Hat specific code in RHEL is written in Python, for example, not C, the traditional language of Linux.

Yeah, that's going to be fun when the 'push incompatible changes'
mentality reaches the Python interpreter. Oh, wait - when it affects
RHEL's own work, they hold back...

> Then we get old farts complaining that the new software is less efficient, because it isn’t written in C.  That’s the tradeoff: computer efficiency for programmer efficiency, because programmers are more expensive and harder to come by.

You get programming efficiency with well designed high level library
component support with stable interfaces regardless of the language
itself.  How long would it take you to hook a perl or java program to
a new sql database (assuming you aren't the first one to ever do it)?
Or parse some xml?   The things that kill programmer time are when you
have to do tedious tasks like that from scratch or deal with interface
changes in the code that was supposed to handle it.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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