[External] : Re: Question about circular references

[David Alayachew]

Hello Archie,

Thank you for your response!

> This sounds like a scenario where a domain-specific
> language might be appropriate. Have you considered taking
> that approach?

So, I have considered it, but the mental overhead in learning a new
language/refamiliarizing myself with one always pushed me away. All my
problems here are significant enough that it is worth blowing up the email
thread, but I fear they might be worse if I tried a new domain language.
Willing to give it a shot though.

The biggest reason why I am pushing for this feature is because I keep
running into a very similar situation -- I attempt a project idea, I try
and model it the simplest way possible to limit indirection and mutability,
I either fail to do so or fail to do it to a level that I can mentally
contain, and then my brain just turns to jelly trying to hold all of the
indirection in my head. It's like when you work out at the gym, and then
you reach a point to where you push your muscles to literal exhaustion, and
they quickly start dying on you. It's the same feeling when I deal with too
much indirection for the scale of problems I am trying to solve.

> An quick & easy way to experiment with this idea is to
> use XML+XSLT to generate whatever (e.g., Java source
> files). Once I used XML+XSLT to generate RPM spec files,
> which were then compiled into RPMs, as a way to do some
> DevOps automation. That's a random example but it worked
> well in terms of the cost/benefit trade-off.

Lol, sounds like fun. Added to the to-do list, and I'll let you know how it
went once I try it out.

> Obviously, Java is a general purpose language, so for any
> particular subset of the programming universe, it's
> probably going to be sub-optimal. That shouldn't be a
> surprise, right?

I mean, I'd be more willing to accept that if there was literally only one
obstacle stopping from doing everything else I wanted to. It is literally
this one problem stopping me from making further progress.

Thank you for your time and help!
David Alayachew

On Tue, Jul 4, 2023 at 4:43 PM Archie Cobbs <archie.cobbs at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 4, 2023 at 2:06 PM David Alayachew <davidalayachew at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I spend a lot of my time writing front end code, path finding algorithms,
>> and natural language processing. These are basically the 3 realms I spend
>> 90% of my time in. All 3 of these treat State Transition Diagrams as the
>> holy grail for representing control flow and decision making. Literally ALL
>> of the business logic I write for these initiatives involves me emulating a
>> state transition diagram directly into Java code.
>>
>
> This sounds like a scenario where a domain-specific language might be
> appropriate. Have you considered taking that approach?
>
> An quick & easy way to experiment with this idea is to use XML+XSLT to
> generate whatever (e.g., Java source files). Once I used XML+XSLT to
> generate RPM spec files, which were then compiled into RPMs, as a way to do
> some DevOps automation. That's a random example but it worked well in terms
> of the cost/benefit trade-off.
>
> Obviously, Java is a general purpose language, so for any particular
> subset of the programming universe, it's probably going to be sub-optimal.
> That shouldn't be a surprise, right?
>
> -Archie
>
> --
> Archie L. Cobbs
>
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