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I'm not really a programming language expert, but it seems to me that having an implementation being the spec wouldn't be a good idea. If the Streem implementat

I'm not really a programming language expert, but it seems to me that having an implementation being the spec wouldn't be a good idea. If the Streem implementation has a bug, then the bug becomes the authoritative behavior. Any platform specific quirks would also make it difficult to have defined behavior.

jfoutz 12y ago
There's an old argument about worse is better. The gist is, doing things the right way is hard and takes a long time. sometimes, it's better to just get something simple out there and deal with the problems later. http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
ianlevesque 12y ago
Yep, welcome to Ruby! To be fair, a spec with tests was reversed out of the ruby implementation[1], so things have improved a bit. 1. http://rubyspec.org/ http://rubyspec.org/
skrebbel 12y ago
Sure, but this is not finished at all. Starting with the spec instead of a prototype implementation sounds like a very very limiting and unrewarding design process.
aidenn0 12y ago
Implementations are nearly always the spec when a language is young. You want to be able to experiment and make changes. Then as it matures, you typically get a spec.
Igglyboo 12y ago
It looks like a weekends worth of work for Matz, I doubt he's even thinking of a spec at this point.
dragonwriter 12y ago
Right now, the closest thing to a spec is the sample FizzBuzz code (as an implicit spec that "this code will solve FizzBuzz"); there is no implementation (just work-in-progress parser/lexer code.) So, while I'll agree that there are issues that come from the implementation being the spec of a language in general, I would say we are well earlier than the point at which we can identify that as a problem with Streem.
xrstf 12y ago
Welcome to PHP. The Zend Engine 2 is basically the spec, even though Facebook has recently (couple of weeks ago) started writing a spec to make sure their HHVM is compatible.

jfoutz 12y ago

There's an old argument about worse is better. The gist is, doing things the right way is hard and takes a long time. sometimes, it's better to just get something simple out there and deal with the problems later. http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

ianlevesque 12y ago

Yep, welcome to Ruby! To be fair, a spec with tests was reversed out of the ruby implementation[1], so things have improved a bit. 1. http://rubyspec.org/ http://rubyspec.org/

skrebbel 12y ago

Sure, but this is not finished at all. Starting with the spec instead of a prototype implementation sounds like a very very limiting and unrewarding design process.

aidenn0 12y ago

Implementations are nearly always the spec when a language is young. You want to be able to experiment and make changes. Then as it matures, you typically get a spec.

Igglyboo 12y ago

It looks like a weekends worth of work for Matz, I doubt he's even thinking of a spec at this point.

dragonwriter 12y ago

Right now, the closest thing to a spec is the sample FizzBuzz code (as an implicit spec that "this code will solve FizzBuzz"); there is no implementation (just work-in-progress parser/lexer code.) So, while I'll agree that there are issues that come from the implementation being the spec of a language in general, I would say we are well earlier than the point at which we can identify that as a problem with Streem.

xrstf 12y ago

Welcome to PHP. The Zend Engine 2 is basically the spec, even though Facebook has recently (couple of weeks ago) started writing a spec to make sure their HHVM is compatible.