[Cuis-dev] Why not to save the image?

[Ezequiel Birman]

This is the sort of conversation I´d love to see as marginal comments when
reading that particular paragraph in The Cuis Book.

Please have a look at https://web.hypothes.is/ for something that is
production ready and that could serve as a starting point.

-- 
Eze

El mié, 2 ago 2023 a la(s) 14:50, ken.dickey--- via Cuis-dev (
cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st) escribió:

> On 2023-08-02 01:22, Szabolcs Komáromi via Cuis-dev wrote:
>
> > I just wondered whether something peculiar to Cuis warrants this
> > definitive statement. But as turned out the book has a strong implicit
> > engineering perspective and saving the image doesn't have any hidden
> > side effect compared to the other Smalltalk implementations. Hilaire
> > added my comment to the end of the code management chapter of  The Cuis
> > Book. Hopefully this makes the validated but implicit engineering
> > standpoint of the book more explicit for future readers.
>
> The experience of using image based languages (Smalltalk, Actor, ..) is
> that the ability to save and reuse an image, over time, leads to cases
> where one cannot reproduce a system from source.  This is bad for
> sharing and bad for commercial products, where source control is
> important to maintaining an investment.
>
> In one project I was working on, I noticed development images getting
> out of sync and people "debugging" to find image differences.  This
> despite source control.  The fix was to disable saving images!  People
> hated me for about a week for doing this, but realized that starting
> from versioned sources and a fresh image each day meant that they really
> did save their work each day to the version control system and it saved
> us, as a group, much time.
>
> This became especially important when we trained up a sibling team in
> Taiwan.  Each day we saved our stuff in the US and wrote up what needed
> to be done next.  The Taiwan team worked during our night do do that and
> the next morning that stuff was magically done and we had another
> chunk/step to work on.  Distributed development can work essentially
> 24/7 if you have good communication and can prime the pump.
>
> This particular project was done in Actor -- basically a Smalltalk IDE
> but with C syntax -- no relation to Actor Semantics.
>
> My experience is that image save based development leads to accidents of
> history -- times when one ends up with images which may work but are not
> easily reproducible from source.  One way to avoid the problem is to get
> in the habit of _always_ reproducing from source.
>
> Like eating well and exercising.  You can have a milkshake once in a
> while, but have one with every meal you are in trouble.
>
> Best to establish and keep good habits.
>
> $0.02,
> -KenD
> --
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>
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