[om-list] Fw: The TomP Software Design -- Re: Current Tasks...

[Tom and other Packers]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Thomas Packer 
To: Curtis Harrison 
Cc: Daniel R (w) Cook ; Thomas L (h) Packer ; Mike (HG) Jones 
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2001 5:31 PM
Subject: The TomP Software Design -- Re: Current Tasks...


2001-08-31

Hello Curtis

    There's nothing pressing for you to work on, except maybe using that HASP CD as well as you can.

    ~~~~~~

    If you're desperate for things to work on ...

    I have a personal project you could help with, but it wouldn't pay well yet -- maybe in stock points, if anything, and if I can convince Dan to let me find subcontractors to help me in the personal project he was almost unwilling to pay me even in stock points alone.

    But here it is anyway, since I want Dan and others to know what I intend to do, ultimately:

    I want to recreate the entire TFStudio ensemble of utilities, the protocol engine, and all the utilities we haven't even thought of yet, in a completely new form: I want to make a shell-scripting type environment, using a whole new, high-level knowledge-processing programming language called MPL (Mathetical Programming Language).

    Sound fun?

    The whole idea of individual dialog-box utilities, with all the associated overhead and over-compartmentalisation is really starting to annoy me.  For the long run (which after six-and-a-half years, we are starting to experience), the whole TF paradigm was less than optimal.

    (No offence, Dan.  I do understand that you originally thought we could sell the TFStudio package to laymen, who were not programmers, and who were not familiar with Unix or other text-based OS-es.  So, I'm not complaining or criticising.  I'm pointing out what all 20/20 hind-sight tells us: what we did wrong, and what we might want to consider doing in order to change this less-than-optimal direction, as soon as possible.)

    So ...

    Costly busy work and disconnectivity was designed into TFStudio, and so inefficiency is inherent in every new utility we program, and in every data analysis study we carry out using them.  Development time is longer than it should be for utilities which are so similar to each other -- and will be still, even after we start using Mike's and your re-usable libraries -- though those things will help a lot.  And after the new utility is made, "run-time" is longer than it should be when you boil a study down into its component parts, and realise that you could have written one utility to do the whole thing, instead of running a long string of disjoint processes.

    If we had had the time, money, and/or the foresight, we should have taken the extra time to design a more generalisable approach: A whole waveform processing language, in which we could more easily write basic file-processing functions of all sorts, which we could then recombine in any way we wished, textually, in a matter of hours, which would allow us to then use the whole combination in one operation, also in a matter of hours, with one set of input parameters, and one final output, instead of having to press so many okay buttons, and individually set so many parameters, and use so much hard-drive space in duplicating so many files.

    The protocol engine was our first (and second) attempt at doing this sort of thing -- while we didn't, and still don't, have quite enough commitment or faith to abandon individual dialog box utilities, and start from scratch.

    Well, while TF is using what it has developed at mediocre studies, I intend to start over with a whole new system, from scratch, which could be tried and tested on studies, in parallel with the current TFStudio, until the gap between the two is small enough that we have the faith to make the leap.

    This will probably be part of my senior project at Weber, and my PhD work in graduate school.

    Feel free to take the leap of faith with me. 

    :-)

Ciao,
Thomas L. Packer
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
ph: 801-299-1285
fax: 801-292-7217
tomp at ThoughtForm.com
tomp at NeuroInsight.com
tomp at BrainResearchInstitute.net
Omnia aput me mathesis fiunt.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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