Re: Aha! moments

Adam <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Jack Unrue wrote:

[ . . . ]

- incremental programming with SLIME

I don't quite follow, Jack. Would you care to expand a little, or point me
to a URL ?

Slime itself wasn't an aha! moment for me, but ILISP was. The basic
revelations for me were that the Lisp system I was interacting with
didn't follow the usual cycle of edit, compile+run, test, debug,
restart; instead, it was something that had a long life and that
accumulated state (in the form of functions and objects), and that
gently modifying the state was better than trashing all of it and
reloading it from scratch. This isn't something specific SLIME, but
SLIME enables it in a very nice way.

(The other nice features like arglist display, inline annotation of
compilation notes, the inspector and debugger, etc are great too.)

When I first started using Linux, I accidentally unpacked a nethack
tarball in the /dev directory. I had no idea how to see what I had
done or how to fix the resulting clutter. So I just reinstalled the
system from scratch to get back to a known state. (I would also
reinstall when my IP address changed, because I only knew that an
installation dialog box prompted for the IP.) This is the same sort of
wholesale flushing of state that just isn't necessary if you know how
to interrogate your evolving, active system and update it to bring it
into the state you need.

I haven't used CLOS's object evolution protocol yet
(i.e. update-instance-for-redefined-class, make-instances-obsolete),
but the fact that the object system accomodates evolution of state
without throwing out progress so far is very encouraging.

Zach
.