[Swift-devel] pilot job paper

[Mihael Hategan]

On Sun, 2011-07-17 at 16:05 -0600, Daniel S. Katz wrote:
> On Jul 17, 2011, at 3:11 PM, Mihael Hategan wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 2011-07-17 at 15:59 -0500, Ketan Maheshwari wrote:
> >> In section IV.C I did not understand this about Swift Coasters: 
> >> 
> >> "" there is no possibility to manage this resource pool
> >> programmatically ""
> > 
> > That statement is silly by construction. The resource pool is managed
> > programmatically. It's not like coasters are implemented in a mechanical
> > device with gears, levers, pulleys, and belts.
> 
> I think the point here was that the program that creates the pilot job cannot manage it - the spawner spawns and then goes away.

I think the problem is that 80% of that section is about Swift, and then
the statement is correct if "programmatically" is replaced by
"dynamically" in the context of Swift + any other PJ system.

But in general I dislike "you cannot do x with y" types of statements.
They don't distinguish between a theoretical impossibility, a feature
not yet there (with various levels of implementation difficulty), and
some feature that doesn't make sense for a given system. 

And when somebody says "you cannot programmatically do x with y" that
hints towards a theoretical impossibility, which is never the case if
some other system supports that x.