Subject: Fundamental approach of MOO

From: [email-masked] (paul reiber)
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 14:51:09 -0800

Pavel> From [email-masked] Mon Nov 22 13:36:09 1993
Pavel>
Pavel> I think it clear that MOO will eventually die.

This saddens me.  MOO is one of the few environments I've grown to respect.

Pavel> It is clearly wrong-headed in many ways when you consider such
Pavel> notions as scaling to globally distributed seamless systems,

Why would MOO's application development and user interaction layer(s?)
need to change/differ (other than subtly) if the server was integrated
with ODBMS's, CORBA interfaces, et al. ?  While the existing inter-MOO
networking mechanisms may leave something to be desired, I don't see MOO
itself as the culprit w.r.t. scaling.

Pavel> and I think it would be a mistake to attempt to evolve this
Pavel> language to address such goals.  MOO is not a sufficiently
Pavel> simple or flexible basis for such an evolution.

I, for one, prefer the MOO paradigm by a long shot over the vast majority
of other approaches extant...  Is it that:
	MOO's implementation is not sufficiently simple/flexible to evolve
or:	MOO's application paradigm is not simple/flexible enough to evolve?

I'm a strong believer in simple and consistent application development
frameworks/environments/paradigms, and in my book MOO rates right up there
with the best of them.

Pavel> I do not believe that any of the currently available or announced systems
Pavel> is going to be a particularly important successor to MOO precisely 
Pavel> because they do not sufficiently well address the scaling problem.

Agreed.  However, only the cream of the crop top-dollar commercial systems
(like HP's Distributed Smalltalk over ParcPlace VisualWorks) even attempt
to address that issue today, so don't feel bad!

Pavel> I believe that a fundamentally different approach is required to
Pavel> move significantly in this direction.

Again, I'm not sure whether you're speaking of the implementation or the
application/user-interface paradigm.  IMHO you'd be hard pressed to find
a better text-based object-oriented application paradigm.

You say MOO's not simple/flexible enough to evolve into a seamless globally-
distributed system. I've never seen more power packaged as simply, and I'll
be disappointed by anything more complicated or less powerful no matter how
well distributed.

Just my $0.02 ...

-Paul
 +---------------------+------------------------+-----------------------------+
 | Paul B. Reiber, Jr. | NYNEX Allink Company   | "To Invent, you need a good |
 |  (914)  644 - 7729  | 4 Gannett Drive,       |  Imagination and a Pile of  |
 |   [email-masked]   | White Plains, NY 10604 |  Junk."     - Thomas Edison |
 +---------------------+------------------------+-----------------------------+

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From: Pavel Curtis <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 15:42:11 -0800

> Date:	Mon, 22 Nov 1993 14:51:09 -0800
> From:	[email-masked] (paul reiber)
> 

All things must die sometime.

> itself as the culprit w.r.t. scaling.

MOO's mechanisms in the areas of security, resource management, scheduling,
distribution, modularity, and performance (among others) are simply too crude
or crippled to support a truly global distributed social VR.  Just to pick one
for illustration, the MOO currently provides tasks with atomic access to all
data in the database while they're running and, if they run too long, simply
kills them.  Neither of these is workable in a scaled-up system where
distribution makes concurrency the norm, not the exception, and where running
out of resources must be a recoverable problem with many possible solutions
(e.g., adding more resources to the system, allowing the application to abort
parts of its computation, etc.).  Trying to graft these notions onto MOO would
be crazy; the only advantage would be some vague kind of compatibility with
existing code.  That compatibility is almost impossible to achieve, though, and
in any case there isn't any MOO code at all right now in comparison to the
amount that would be written in a global-scale system, so there's little point
in trying to preserve it directly.

> of other approaches extant...

I intend no offense by this, but I think this statement shows more about your
knowledge of the state of the art in both programming languages and distributed
systems than it does about the state of the art itself.  There are a number of
better, more flexible bases for future development than MOO.  Don't get me
wrong, I think that MOO is a pretty good MUD server, but we must go far beyond
such toy systems to reach the kinds of systems and applications I'm
envisioning.

>  Is it that:

The former, as I outlined above.

> to address that issue today, so don't feel bad!

I doubt very much that either of those systems is attempting to address truly
global distributed systems issues.  They would have to be insane to try to do
so in a commercial environment at the current time.

> a better text-based object-oriented application paradigm.

This illustrates exactly my point from above: what I'm trying to support goes
light years beyond a simple `text-based object-oriented application paradigm'.

	Pavel