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Garbage collection took around 40 years to become mainstream. There are lots of important concepts that the industry still ignores. I don't think that 'comput
by ken 14y ago
Garbage collection took around 40 years to become mainstream. There are lots of important concepts that the industry still ignores. I don't think that 'computer science being ignored by industry programmers for decades' is evidence of anything except the industry's own technical apathy.
Personally, I think the image model is a huge win for a single programmer, while the file model makes it easier to integrate changes from a big team. (There's not really a "DVCS for images" yet.) When I look around, I see that tools that have won tend to support big teams of less-efficient programmers.
So it's not really surprising to me that, by numbers, the file model dominates. That's not an indictment of the image model.
What do you mean by "better"? There are more Corollas than BMW 5's on the streets here, but does that mean they're better, or worse, or better for a particular use case? I'll take the image model for building a fast prototype any day, even if I have to hand it over to a big team writing C or Java for the final product.
- gfunk911 14y agoYou state that the image model is good for a single programmer, but not large teams. How much of this do you feel is due to the lack of tools (VCS, IDEs, etc) equipped to deal with the image model, and how much is inherent to the models?
- ken 14y agoI was careful to say that the image model is great for a single programmer, but not that at was bad for large teams -- simply that large teams are a (current) strength of the file model. Large teams are built of individuals, after all, and there's no reason they can't use images on their own. There's just not much in the way of tooling (yet) to support integration at the image level. Is this limitation inherent? I think that's impossible to say. How many people accurately predicted the importance of a DVCS, before ever seeing one built? Or for that matter, a garbage collector? In cases where it's not obvious, the tools drive our understanding. I don't see anything inherent in image models that would prevent this, though languages don't seem designed in a way that would make this particularly easy. For example, right now we're collaboratively editing a (very simple) shared image (HN).
- rprospero 14y agoWhere do you see the advantages of the image model for a single programmer? I ask because, when I've played around with image based languages, I hated them. However, I've encountered programmers vastly wiser than myself who seem to love it, so I suspect that I'm missing something important.