Re: incapable and obsolete APT / Aptitude replacement

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 09:37:29PM -0800, Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> was heard to say:
> I made early on was not to fetishize arbitrary "optimality" definitions,
> because you can end up chasing phantoms that way.  "Optimal" solutions
> are not necessarily best.  They are good for academic projects, though,
> because you can easily "grade" yourself on whether you're doing a good
> job and write papers about what a good job you did. ;-)

  This has been bothering me all night, so I'd better explain myself
more or it will bother me all day. :-)

  Academics like to completely analyze and understand problems and their
solutions.  This is good.  I like doing it myself.  It does, however,
bias you in favor of solutions that can be completely understood and
analyzed.  If they have a problem that's hard to analyze, there's a
tendency to replace it with a similar problem that they know how to
analyze; for instance, problems in programming language design are often
tackled by trying to find better and better ways to express trivial
little computational problems.  Sometimes that gets you a good answer;
sometimes it gets you an OK answer and sheds light on how to design more
practical solutions; sometimes it gets you a programming language that's
*really, really good* at writing the factorial function and nothing
else.  Part of the problem is that you don't know where you'll end up
with this approach until you try, which is why we call it "research".

  Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest that their approach was bad; just
that it's not the only way.  (and really, if I had the time, I'd
probably be doing the same thing they are; my coding process is mainly
optimized around fitting my work into about 10 hours a week, average)

  Daniel