Temporal information hiding. Half baked or not, I like that a lot. So the term "transient", for example, is analogous to the term "private", but across time. Personally, I had never thought about it that way. Indeed, having this as a conceptualization of the problem makes me feel closer to understanding the problem and developing the right set of tools for solving it, even though I am not at all likely to be the guy to actually try to solve it :-) This could turn out to be an example of a situation in which, buy carefully characterizing the reasons why something is impossible, the solution becomes evident :-)
--marcs
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Jellinghaus <robj@unrealities.com>
To: Mark S. Miller <markm@caplet.com>
Cc: e-lang@eros-os.org <e-lang@eros-os.org>; arturo@woz.org <arturo@woz.org>
Date: Wednesday, September 15, 1999 10:08 PM
Subject: Re: Sun rejects orthogonal persistence for Java
>At 09:41 PM 9/15/1999 -0700, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>>>>http://java.sun.com/aboutJava/communityprocess/jsr.html
>>>>
>>>>Look down the list for proposal JSR-000020. It's the one proposal in
the
>>>>list which was not ACCEPTED. Hmm, wonder why?????
>>>
>>>Actually, I still wonder why. Do you have any reason to believe they
>>>rejected this for the right reasons?
>
>Oh, goodness, now you've got me wondering if I even know what the right
>reasons *are*! :-) Seriously, I have no idea why they rejected it. They
>don't say, which is disappointing. What would be the *wrong* reasons to
>reject it?
>
>I know how much trouble we ran into at EC with trying to do rapid code
>development without practical tools for updating persistent instances in
>tandem with changes to their classes' code; to my mind, schema evolution is
>the killer issue with orthogonal persistence at the language level.
>
>I am now looking at the papers down near the bottom of
>http://www.sunlabs.com/research/forest/com.sun.labs.pjw3.main.html
>which talk about practical experience handling code updates in persistent
>Java object stores... don't yet know what they've come up with. (At a
>glance, not much.)
>
>This begs the question of whether orthogonal persistence at the language
>level is *conceptually* wrong, by some nebulous argument relating to
>information hiding from your future self... i.e. you don't ever want to
>tell the future you anything more than you have to about what you are doing
>now, since what you are doing now is so very likely to be wrong. Hmm,
>temporal information hiding??? This concept just occurred to me, so please
>pardon its half-bakedness.
>
>Cheers,
>Rob
>
>