Programming language productivity

[Jack Diederich]

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 02:21:39AM -0700, malv wrote:
> Once you get involved in larger projects, the dynamic nature of the
> programming tool becomes much more important. I mean by this, the
> ability to stop running code, modify or add to it and continue without
> having to re-establish the state of the program. This may sound trivial
> to many, but in major applications setting up the state again can take
> a considerable processing time. Such feature should be available from
> within the debugging tools.
> 
> In fact, languages like Smalltalk, Lisp and even VB offer this
> possibility.
> Ruby coming up strongly these days also has this dynamic reload
> capability.
> To sum up, I like Python very much but I don't understand how come this
> basic flaw has not been taken care of. It is sufficient to search for
> "reload" to see how many people have struggled with it over the years.
> I hate the idea of having to take up Ruby to really find out how it
> could serve me better in this most critical productivity area.

Please stop saying 'Python' should support this like 'Ruby' because
'Ruby' doesn't -- Rails, the application, does.  Rails can do it most
of the time because it knows the particulars about Rails objects.  If
you are messing with the internals of Rails I'm sure an call to
'Dispatcher.restart_application'[1] has a good chance of dying.

Complain to the developers of python _applications_ if their app
doesn't have this feature.  As I said last time you b*tched about it,
there can't be a standard magic reload that works on everything.
Application developers can implement something that works for their
specific application because they know the internals.

If you are going to complain please at least post some context
about what you think should happen and some links to how other folks
have implemented it.  Asserting python should do 'Reload and Go'
isn't very helpful.

-Jack

[1] I googled up a reference to it here
    <http://www.unpossible.com/2006/04/20/time-saver-rails-console-reset/#comments>