what's so difficult about namespace?

[Xah Lee]

On Nov 26, 4:57 pm, Kaz Kylheku <kkylh... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2008-11-26, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Can you see, how you latched your personal beef about anti software
> > crisis philosophy into this no namespace thread?
>
> I did no such thing. My post was about explaining the decision process
> that causes humans to either adopt some technical solution or not.

Yes, you did that by following a moronic pop theory. The purpose of
this message is to tell you, that you should have decades of study of
multiple deciplines in history, economics, psychology, sociology, to
be immune to the lots of pop theories that float about especially
today with the internet.

let me explain why the pop theory you fell for breaks apart with
respect to the namespace issue here in this thread.

lacking namespace is not due to some ratio of perceived benefit
divided by perceived pain.

The benefit is huge, practical, and undeniable, the pain to adopt the
namespace fix is almost non-existant, because any such solution will
obvious be done in a backward compatible way. If the solution is
provided, the pain at max is just like a version upgrade. Java, Perl,
and all langs goes thru major upgrade every few years.

there are social reasions and technical reasons why langs lacking much
needed namespace took so long to fix. Social reason being, as others
has said in this thread, for examples: compatibilities issues in the
case of javascript's browser/server situation. In the case of Scheme
lisp, there's the issue of committee consensus and the RnRS standard.
You can't just have someone created a namespace implementation and
have every other Scheme lisp adopt it. As far as i know, namespace has
been in lots of Scheme implementations for long. The problem is
getting it into RnRs. The situation in Emacs lisp, at least partly
have to do with lack of developers, and partly have to do with Richard
Stallman. First, you need someone capable enough to actually implement
it as some sort of proof of concept, then you have to pass thru
Stallman himself, else you get XEmacs fork situation, which
significantly hurled GNU Emacs forward for the past about 15 years. In
the case of PHP, i suppose the primary reason is that it works without
namespace so far. PHP lang is mostly hack. The lang is so messy that
namespace is not just one thing that needs to be fixed. All the above
reasons, are of social one. There are undoubtly some technical reasons
too. I don't have compiler knowledge so i can't say what, but to say
the least, that creating a namespace in a existing lang that is widely
used in the industry is not something a average computer science
graduate can do.

The above are ugly, perhaps complex, real world facts. It's not some
pop fucking book about some pop pereciveness of some ratios.

one can go on analyze the perceived benefit and pain about the
namespace issue on each language specifically. You can see how it
doesn't apply. But going in detail on this'd be waste of time. If you
spend your time to debunk pop theories, play their game, the
scientific establishment would go no where.

There are quite a lot pop books on the market, they usually sells.
Their audience is the mass market. They have little scientific value.
They are not valued by any expert in any field. Most of them cannot be
invalidated in any way. This does not mean pop theory, pop psychology,
wisdoms, or anything not dry science, are all bullshit. Ultimately,
there's no magic rule that can tell you which is which. The degree and
quality of you or the masses's judgement, ultimately depends on your
education level. That is why, general education is so important, in
every nation and culture, while it's little talked about only because
its so obvious, so plain.

here's another pop book you might like:

• Book Review: Patterns of Software
  http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/bookReviewRichardGabriel.html

this one is published a decade ago by a lisp dignitary.
Its theory of programing and software engineering is poetry and
taoism.
It suggests that C will be the last lang.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄