[E-Lang] E Project, Documentation, and new programmers

[Karp, Alan]

Chip Morningstar said:

> I'm not ordinarily one to waste bandwidth just to say "me too"

I guess I'd like to take the opportunity to say "not me too".  Sometimes you
simply get it wrong, and it's better to bite the bullet when your user base
is small rather than be faced with living with your mistakes forever.  Now,
I'm not saying that every syntax change was absolutely necessary, but if
you're going to break existing code, you might as well do a good job of it
:-}

Early adopters take a risk; they know things will change out from under
them.  The key is support.  When we made the changes from e-speak Beta 2.2
to Beta 3.0, we had 3 customers with non-trivial code bases.  In fact, one
of them had been generating revenue for a couple of months.  We took it upon
ourselves to do a lot of the conversion work.  We ended up providing 2
people per customer for 1-2 months.  The process was still disruptive, but
the customers understood the reason for the change and appreciated the help
we gave them.  Key to their acceptance was the promise that future changes
would not break their code, a promise we've been able to keep, more or less
:)

_________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Decision Technology Department
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories MS 1U-2
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(650) 857-3967, fax (650) 857-6278
https://ecardfile.com/id/Alan_Karp
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Alan_Karp/