Re: [Axiom-developer] CVS, Arch, Darcs

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  Just thought I'd add my feeble $.02 to Tim's breathtaking
vision. 

The goals are obviously quite impressive. In my work with GCL
supporting maxima, acl2, and axiom for Debian, though, I've already
run into obstacles associated with Lisp's extreme level of
integration.  A similar philosophy has killed Windows in comparison to
'keep-it-simple' modular Linux/unix design, IMHO.  For example, at
present, without some as-yet-to-be-implemented distributed patching
mechanism, a bug fix in GCL requires a rebuild of GCL + all three
programs on 12 architectures.  It appears that there is a definite
tradeoff between the advantages of integration to developers/users,
and a modular independent black box leggo-like construction for ease
of maintenance and bug fixing.  I still have more experience in C than
lisp, and would be pulling out all my hair even thinking about
implementing some of the spaghetti I've seen from scratch, at least in
C.  Simplicity and modularity let me leverage my feeble time resources
much better, in my experience.

Just a thought.

Take care,
-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
==========================================================================
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah