Re: [tlug] STM (was: Re: work times & accommodation @tokyo)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:
 > 2008/7/28 Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>:

 > The point is this: I read Attila's question as, "Has anyone on the
 > list direct experience with using STM? Does it work as advertised?"
 > Your answer sounds like, "No, but it should work."
 > 
 > Which is a fine answer--given your background and experience--but to a
 > different question. :)

I don't think that's really a worthwhile distinction.  The blundering
about that Curt and I have done regarding "are we talking about
Starling or Google?" is essential; these are really different
problems.  In fact Curt and I seem to have come back to the "would
agile programming really scale" thread; he claims that it (any of
several "it"s ;-) would work if management would back it, and I want
to know how to manage the scaling process.  Impasse, but despite
Curt's claim that I'm just caviling until he gives up, I don't think
that's true.

But here, sure, if somebody has experience with STM, especially in
Haskell, with a large app, we'd like them to speak up.  But without
that, the best we can do is to take Curt's opinion as somebody who has
used Haskell STM, and note that Haskell and GHC have pretty tight
processes a la Scheme SRFIs and Python PEPs: STM wouldn't be a part of
Haskell if it hadn't proved itself as a best practice to some extent.

I also will say that as a non-Haskell amateur programmer I found Simon
Peyton-Jones's chapter in /Beautiful Code/ quite persuasive.  I didn't
get the impression that he uses it only on toy problems, quite the
opposite.