[e-lang] Events as Bad Ideas

[Valerio Bellizzomi]

On 26/11/2004, at 16.20, Stiegler, Marc D wrote:

(snip)
>> The focus of "Why Events are a Bad Idea" seems to be 
>> performance. The focus of E is robustness in the face of 
>> large and evolving distributed systems; E promise pipelining 
>> has as goals, high performance when latency is the limiting 
>> factor, and an interface to the human programmer that 
>> improves the programmer's chances of coming out alive. In the 
>> programmer-interface goal, it is not unlike the goal that was 
>> set by Djikstra's "Goto Considered Harmful": inside the 
>> machine, goto branch instructions are the only thing you've 
>> got for flow of control. But by wrapping these primitives in 
>> for loops, if-then-else, and try-catch, you create something 
>> humans can use, understand, and maintain.

A program that used goto instructions extensively was called a "spaghetti
program". We used to try to avoid the goto instruction when programming in
Basic. We were all happy when the new Basic was released and it had the
GOSUB/RETURN instructions. But at that time, we also were limited to
programs of 64Kbytes. After that, truly structured languages like Pascal
made surface.


Val