Retval (was: [E-Lang] E Project, Documentation, and new programmers)

[Marc Stiegler]

> Is a radical change of style really needed here?  The current style ain't
> broken, and we've got bigger fish to fry (CapTP, Hydro, Persistence,
> 1.0 & publicity, Auditors, PassByCopy with mobile code).
>
> As Tyler predicted, the pendulum of priorities has indeed swung.  It's
> called learning by bitter experience.  One would have thought I'd had
enough
> of this kind of experience for this lesson to be permanent, but apparently
> not yet.  Maybe now.

I would like to observe that Zooko's proposal (which I had not understood
correctly when I replied to him the first time, see the old email

http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/e-lang/2001-March/004772.html

)

is beautifully upwards compatible from the current E. Hence it is an
opportunity we can take on at our leisure. In a phone call with Zooko, I
have persuaded him that the right moment (at least for markm) would be after
hydro is put to bed and there is a comm system operational. Goodness, we
could even postpone a decision until we actually have some more newbie
programmers in our hands to experiment on! :-) (markm, this is something
else we need on the list of priorities, collecting some early adopters at
the right time, probably, frankly, after we have Persistence close to being
in the bag, when we know  what it looks like and I have documented it in
Walnut ). Retval could easily be the feature added to create version 1.0.1.

--marcs