[r6rs-discuss] (no subject)

[David Rush]

2009/2/23 Chris Hanson <cph at chris-hanson.org>:
> Although I consider myself as someone who understands large-scale
> programming, my recent move to Google showed me that academia really
> has NO CLUE what "large scale" means.

To be fair, most people in the industry also have no idea what "large
scale" means. When I moved to AOL (before they largely died off), I
had the same epiphany *and* I had been working at Nortel previously,
whose code base is no small thing. I could carry on about the nature
of the difference, but it would really be missing the point:
Million-user scale systems and the modern web have made software
engineering a different game than what I was taught way back when. On
the other hand, it's not all *that* different, but unless you've
worked on a project that spans 5 (or more! the largest I ever worked
on had 22) development groups each with their own server farms
(average size: 10 machines, but sigma = 30) *and* tried to hunt bugs
in that environment - well, you haven't really appreciated "large
scale".

> A Scheme implementation, no matter how large and complete,
> can't really compare to this kind of scale.  So although it may be
> true that there are academics who understand programming at scale,
> clearly there are lessons to be learned from the people who build
> commercial software.

What I find interesting though, is that I advocate the most minimal
modularization constructs that I publicly hear about. So minimal are
they that I figure everyone ignores me as a crank :) But Lambda really
is the ultimate modularization construct.

Really.

david rush
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