[Cuis-dev] Dynabook and education

Philip Bernhart philip.bernhart at posteo.de
Wed Jun 17 10:00:36 PDT 2020


"ken.dickey--- via Cuis-dev" <cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st> writes:

> I have looked at Erlang.  Live update and live failover are pole star 
> goals.
>
> My questions are around the proper model to communicate with and the 
> support environment which I can explain and orient in.
>
> As someone said "if you can afford to fail, you can do it in any 
> programming language.  We can't afford to fail".

I don't understand what you mean by that train of thought. But when
you are referencing Erlang for it's motto of "failing fast", then
I don't get what you mean. Because this is about that components fail,
recover and then fail again, etc. But the whole system is still up and
running and processing input. Any fault tolerant system out there works
like that space rockets, moon landers, drones, etc. they are designed
for partial failure and recover from it. So the quote "If you can afford
to fail, you can do it in any programming languan. We can't afford
to fail" is an unreflected quote.

The quote seems to come from the group of people who want to have a perfect
system of well typed components which mechanically fit into each other
(Rust, Haskell, Ada, etc.) this hinking is contrary to what Smalltalk
is about (organic loose fitting, fault tolerant like an organism).

So I don't understand what you mean.


Cheers,
Philip


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