Re: is lisp the answer? /linkbait

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Dustin Getz <dustin.getz@gmail.com> wrote:

systems integration is hard because the underlying systems aren't designed to be composable, or at least in big systems it never turns out that way. i wonder if systems never turn out composable because they are implemented using patterns that aren't composable (by people who don't undertand referential transparency, or even know what it is). and if all systems were implemented, from the smallest, most tactical level, all the way up, using composable patterns -- referentially transparent patterns -- the natural outcome is composable software components. which would mean "finding the right glue" isn't hard anymore.

I'll admit that I don't know what referential transparency means. And apologies if this is OT, but here are my thoughts on glue and integration.

As far as I've seen the lack of composable systems is because the means of composing then isn't consistent. Single-broker message queues, øMQ, protobufs, messagepack, json, http, html. Nothing fits every situation or something does maybe it's not approachable enough for people to choose it. If everything were in a single Lisp runtime you'd still have this problem (afaik) when you start scaling out horizontally. Even Erlang's IPC breaks down when the number of machines grows too large.

I find the "glue" tends to largely center on making disparate systems talk to each other. Until we can find a good common transport and marshaling system that covers most cases, the glue will likely continue.

-Mat