[BRLTTY] Getting my braille driver for the FCHAD working.

[S. Massy]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 04:22:28AM -0400, Dave Mielke wrote:
> [quoted lines by timothyhobbs at seznam.cz on 2012/10/14 at 16:32 +0200]
> 
> >But at this point, why are we using C at all?  If we want good design and 
> >maintainability at the price of performance then we should use a higher level 
> >language.  Once you start repacking values into structs to make scoping more 
> >obvious you lose the performance advantages of using a low level language.  
> >And you still haven't gained the clean clarity of a high level one.  
> 
> I don't disagree with you in principle, but I do disagree with you in 
> perspective.
> 
> First of all, whoever said that performance is the issue? Would it shock you to 
> hear me say that performance isn't the issue? Well ... it isn't.
> 
> Do you think that brltty is just a fun toy which runs on high-level operating 
> systems like Linux and Windows? Are you aware that it also runs on DOS, and 
> that work is underway to enable it to run within the Grub bootr loader? There's 
> no way that necessarily limited environments such as those would be able to 
> adequately support the kinds of high-level languages which you have in mind.
> 
> Are you aware that brltty isn't a university project? All of us who work on it 
> do this as a strictly volunteer effort, and most of us have families, jobs, 
> etc. Why would we waste our precious time rewriting something that works, just 
> ecaause it's a theoretically good idea?
> 
> Aside from being a pointless way to be spending our time, that kind of work 
> would also come with the need for a great deal of retesting of code which is 
> known to be reliable, as well as the need to retest with all of the various 
> models of braille devices, each of which is extremely expensive and/or 
> extremely difficult to gain free access to. Additionally, we'd no longer have 
> any time to devote to useful work such as supporting more types of braille 
> devices, more host platforms, etc.
Dave is 250% right. You can think of brltty as "production" software, in
its way as crucial to its community as the Linux kernel; people are
highly unlikely to rewrite or reinvent it for mere philosophical or
aesthetic reasons, nor even for a possible slight performance increase.
Not that my opinion matters in any respect on this discussion, but a
better understanding of this project and community probably would help
you gain insight for your project, as it seems to focus on human-machine
relationships, and all of us on this list very much rely on such a
relationship to lead more productive lives. :)

Just my penny's worth...

Cheers,
S.M.