fenics team mailing list archive

[Kevin Long <krlong@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 27 September 2005 10:17, Matthew Knepley wrote:
>
>   Solved is something I reserve for math problems (even there it is dicey),
> but engineering solution "do better". We definitely kick autoconf's butt,
> and nothing comparable exists in Windows since they have such ironfisted
> control. I will talk about this at FEniCS '05.

Matt,

I wholeheartedly agree with your contention that the abysmal state of systems 
codes can be improved by the same sort of careful CS design we're trying to 
do in our FE codes. 

For example, a few years back, Paul Boggs and I did this with GUI design: we 
wrote a code that read an XML description of the task the GUI was to 
accomplish and produced the Java components to carry it out. Our foray into 
GUI-land was spurred by a desire within Sandia to have GUI interfaces for 
optimization. Since we had no intellectual interest in writing such a GUI, we 
decided to slay the beast once and for all by writing a single code to write 
GUIs for us. Unfortunately, once we did the proof-of-concept code we were 
never able to find a suitable programmer to hand it off to for transition to 
production: the good Java coders at Sandia didn't think at the level of 
abstraction required to understand our approach. Paul and I of course wanted 
to get back to mathematical software, so we dropped it and the code now lies 
on a disk somewhere unused. I still think it was a nice piece of CS work, 
though.

This same basic idea -- solve a general problem once, abstractly -- can be 
applied throughout systems programming as you have done with your configure 
system. As bad as they are, even the horrible autoconf/automake system and 
the less-horrible-but-still-bad make system were first attempts at 
generalizing certain systems tasks rather than writing a bunch of one-off 
scripts.

- kevin