(Prolog + LISP + Erlang) with integration issues versus C++

[David Hopwood]

Serge Aleynikov wrote:
> It sounds regretful, yet from your initial post it looked like the 
> managerial decision had already been made influenced by recommendations 
> outside of your technical team.  It is very difficult to steer 
> management decision in the right direction, unless you have a lot of 
> respect from them or a lot of money (and/or reputation).  Otherwise all 
> you have left is to abide their rules.
> 
>  From the statements below it is clear that the decision was made by 
> people who were never involved in maintenance of medium/large projects 
> developed in C++, and therefore they didn't realize the cost of the 
> infrastructure needed to support such projects.

Indeed. This will be more expensive than the cross-language integration
issues would have been (even if you had stuck with three languages rather
than moving the Prolog stuff to Lisp or Erlang).

Dev Functional wrote:
>> 10)  All storage related standards have types defined in C and it 
>>      makes sense to have the programmatic representation as close as
>>      possible to the standard.

While it does make sense to have a (not necessarily "the") programmatic
representation as close as possible to the format specification, C/C++
types do not provide this: the byte order and alignment/padding is
implementation-defined, so you have to write code that manually converts
between a C structure and an external format if you want portability (or
correctness, in some cases). Erlang bitfields, OTOH, do allow you to
directly reflect the format specification at the language level.

I know that doesn't really help much at this point.

>> 11)  The management also highlighted that if the languages so far used
>>      (prolog,lisp,erlang) were so great then the capitalists would have
>>      grabbed them up long time ago and made lots of money by now by
>>      developing and selling products.  So, either the capitalists are
>>      fools or the current development team !

If I had been at the meeting, at this point I would probably have made some
comment that would have got me fired.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood@REDACTED>