On 11/21/2011 1:31, Invisible wrote:
> Other than providing a library that says "if this thread dies, restart it",
> I'm not sure what help the libraries actually provide.

The whole distributed processing thing? "If this thread dies, restart it" 
isn't especially robust if both threads are on the same machine.

The heartbeat monitor, that restarts the entire VM if it locks up?

The logging libraries that let you know there's a problem so you can fix it?

The debugging libraries that let you debug a process that's running on some 
other machine somewhere?

> The usual problem is that I start writing all the code, and half way through
> I suddenly discover that due to some interaction I hadn't thought of, the
> program basically won't work the way it's currently structured. (Or won't
> work very well, anyway.) I don't think writing comments would prevent that.

No, of course not. If you're writing the wrong code, commenting what you're 
writing before you write it won't prevent that. Of course, I find if I 
comment it before I write it, the number of times I miss a corner case 
plummets drastically, because I'm not totally focused on the minutia of the 
current line of code, but rather on what I'm trying to accomplish.

"Some interaction I hadn't thought of" needs a higher-level design document, 
like an actual requirements spec, to avoid. And of course you still can't 
always avoid it, by definition of the phrase "hadn't thought of."

> It might make a useful to-do list, however.

And it's handy when you come back six months later and you have to read the 
code to see if it's the code you want to look at.

> To this day I have never yet seem a firewall which blocks *outbound*
> traffic.

It's not uncommon in even a fairly small corporation.

>> Nah. There were lots of systems putting apps over http because it would
>> go thru firewalls long before anyone tried to reimplement stuff that
>> everyone already had software for like email.
>
> Really?

Yep

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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