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Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no?

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Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> writes:
> I work in the subsea oil and gas industry... If you screw up, you
> really could end up with a Gulf of Mexico type situation. I'd say the
> work I do is probably quite similar to Paul Bennet's line of work.

Yes I can see that as similar.

> * Implementation
> * In house testing

Do you have multi-person, in-depth code inspection as part of the
implementation phase?  That seems to be an essential part of Paul
Bennett's process.  I've been involved with two projects that supposedly
used it (for embedded C code) but what the first one actually did was
pretty ludicrous.  The second one seemed more likely to "do it right"
but the project got reorganized before it got to that phase.

> I would also say that it could potentially apply in the web world too.
> If you are designing a payment portal ala Paypal...

Yeah, I've done some financial-sector security stuff, and of course they
were much more careful than the typical informational web site, though
below (say) aerospace-sector safety-critical processes as far as I can
tell.  One good thing we got to do in one project was build an
informally specified prototype in Python to quickly develop the
product's feature set, before writing a solidified spec and
re-implementing (in C) on the target device.  This worked out pretty
well, though for various (good) organizational reasons, the next phase
ended up being done by a different group (and they used J2ME (embedded
Java) instead of C, another wise choice IMHO).

I think the end product came out better than a pure up-front design
could have delivered, due to designers' being unable to see too many
moves ahead in the "chess game" without an actual implementation in
their hands.  The product won some kind of industry award though I don't
know if the award was a really meaningful one.

> I'd be very surprised if any startup these days was just flat-out
> balls-to-the-wall coding. In the 90's maybe. The web is such a hostile
> place, and since your web presence *is* your business, it has to be
> treated as mission critical "must not fail".

Take a look at thedailywtf.com any day of the week, and cry. ;-)

In reality web sites don't often suffer serious total outages due to
application-level software problems.  Instead, out of the 100's of
features (most of them non-critical), there are usually a few obscure
things not working completely correctly.  There might be some customer
annoyance (or better, nobody notices), and you push out a fix when you
can.  I used Paypal yesterday and saw some problems like that, and
didn't consider it a big deal.

I do know some guys who work at Paypal and I hear generally good things
about how Paypal does stuff.  I may ask them about it sometime.

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abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? gavino_himself <visploveslisp@gmail.com> - 2012-08-22 13:20 -0700
  Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2012-08-22 17:31 -0700
  Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Ron Aaron <rambamist@gmail.com> - 2012-08-23 06:25 +0300
    Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? jacko <jackokring@gmail.com> - 2012-08-24 08:41 -0700
      Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? "Rod Pemberton" <do_not_have@notemailnot.cmm> - 2012-08-25 03:46 -0400
        Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? jacko <jackokring@gmail.com> - 2012-08-25 10:03 -0700
      Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2012-08-25 04:51 -0700
        Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? "Rod Pemberton" <do_not_have@notemailnot.cmm> - 2012-08-26 06:03 -0400
        Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? John Passaniti <john.passaniti@gmail.com> - 2012-08-26 20:19 -0700
          Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2012-08-27 04:38 -0700
            Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? John Passaniti <john.passaniti@gmail.com> - 2012-08-27 12:37 -0700
              Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Unknown <dog@gmail.com> - 2012-08-29 18:53 +0000
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2012-08-29 12:30 -0700
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2012-08-29 14:37 -0500
              Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Unknown <dog@gmail.com> - 2012-08-29 18:53 +0000
              Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Unknown <dog@gmail.com> - 2012-09-08 22:14 +0000
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2012-09-09 01:12 +0200
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-09-08 18:04 -0700
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2012-09-09 15:01 -1000
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-09-09 18:57 -0700
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2012-09-09 18:47 -1000
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2012-09-10 01:19 -0700
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-09-10 08:18 -0700
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2012-09-10 16:21 +0000
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? "Paul E. Bennett" <Paul_E.Bennett@topmail.co.uk> - 2012-09-10 18:41 +0100
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2012-09-11 00:37 +0200
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? "Paul E. Bennett" <Paul_E.Bennett@topmail.co.uk> - 2012-09-11 19:07 +0100
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Mark Wills <forthfreak@gmail.com> - 2012-09-12 00:32 -0700
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Doug Hoffman <glidedog@gmail.com> - 2012-09-10 09:09 -0400
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2012-09-10 06:49 -0700
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2012-09-10 15:17 +0000
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or  no? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2012-09-10 14:17 +0000
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or  no? Doug Hoffman <glidedog@gmail.com> - 2012-09-14 11:54 -0400
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2012-09-15 02:11 -0700
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2012-09-18 12:11 +0000
                Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? gavino_himself <visploveslisp@gmail.com> - 2012-09-14 03:22 -0700
        Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? gavino_himself <visploveslisp@gmail.com> - 2012-08-30 20:13 -0700
    Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? gavino_himself <visploveslisp@gmail.com> - 2012-08-30 20:16 -0700
      Re: abstraction: do haskell and lisp beat forth in abstraction? or no? "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2012-08-30 17:44 -1000

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