Re: Progress Update

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Pierre Phaneuf wrote:

>Note that Unix ran for more than 20 years without trees for directories.
>:-)

Note that the C64 worked fine completely *without* directories ;)

>And you're not thinking that FAT or NTFS might have trees? ;-))

Hey, I'm talking about *filesystems*!!
Ok, NTFS is actually quite ok, but FAT... *shudder*

>I'm not saying that you shouldn't use your HashTable for directories.
>I'm just saying that putting so much effort into something so easily
>fixable later on (I'm assuming good modularity here) is *not* helping
>PenguinPlay as a project. It isn't the first time that PenguinPlay "dies
>out", maybe this is a reason.

Well, now you stumbled and kicked an excellent counter-argument directly
into my hands ;)

The *real* work, the one that *really* took a long time was making the
basic internal PFile structure versatile enough to adapt to later changes,
making it fixable. The algorithm switch was simple and fast. IIRC we
started thinking about it perhaps two weeks ago, and now it's almost done.
And consider that PenguinPlay goes through major changes now. There were -
are - many things sucking up our time besides PFile coding.

>Read this page for further enlightenment on this matter:
>http://www.jwz.org/worse-is-better.html

I *think* I already read it some time ago. But jwz is always a good read,
so I'll look it up again.

>The full paper can be found at
>http://www.ai.mit.edu/docs/articles/good-news/good-news.html

Thanks for the link.

>Good, but think about *how* you'll get there. Think about how to make a
>"perfect computer virus", such as Unix and C were.
>
>Life and evolution rates success by one factor: population.
>
>The idea isn't to get a perfect design, it is to get the best possible
>design that will *succeed*. Such are engineering compromises.

I very much agree with you on that actually :-)


	Christian
-- 

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