The comments section of this blog tends to attract spam so lately I have taken to requiring moderation and being lazy about it. As a result it’s generally quiet around here.

Congratulations and thanks for this very amusing way of informing the world of your luck. All the best wishes for your child process.

(Btw, I might be using your new syscall in a future project… )

I do not think that f(x y) is necessarily any worse, by itself, than (f x y), although I do think that making ‘f’ and ‘x’ the “same,” from a syntax perspective, is actually one of the plusses of s-expressions.

But what I disliked about SKILL was that it was very much bolted-on. You could pretend you were writing in a C-like language for a while, but it wouldn’t be long until the underlying Lisp-ness would leak through — (2*(3+4)) being the sort of expression that would break and surprise someone used to infix and C.

I found it a bit tedious to memorize in which ways SKILL differed from Lisp and which ways from C, so it was just easier to ignore the syntatic sugar and just write plain Lisp, except with lots of loops.

You can check my survey why Lisp is not popular. Syntax is on very top.

http://kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-you-do-not-use-lisp-results-of-poll.html

But what was the problem with f(a x) syntax in practice? In my opinion, it reflects the fact that f is really different than a and x.

Ship dates and mainlining code are going to be in tension, for sure, as are other business concerns like competitive advantage. Except for the latter, publishing code early is almost as good as mainlining it early — at least then issues get on the appropriate peoples’ radar (e.g. next person who rewrites PM might remember that company X wants feature Y, oh and they already have a patch.. guess whose interface is the template).

“Upstream first,” primarily a yardstick by which distributions are measured, is perhaps an unfair one to be applied across the board, and those companies who are good at working within the community still struggle in some cases (cf intel wireless). But it’s a nice target to aim for, and Google could be a leader here.

A few months on and things are looking a bit better: HTC is shipping binary releases that more closely match the code drop, the community has by and large figured out how to build and in some cases enhance the released code, and people are still arguing about how the OOM notifier should work. It just seems like we could have been here six months ago.

Arve’s been wrangling with the linux-pm list for months now on the base power framework, etc, which other stuff depends on, for example. So for good or ill, it’s not entirely for lack of trying…

- Brian