As I’ve found out, Nukumi can be adapted to a lot of situations, but certain things just aren’t possible without hacking the source files directly. I was hoping to find a workaround, as it is likely to make updates more difficult.
I wondered making a tool to apply WEB-like change files (diffs, more or less) to the source, but found it too difficult to integrate to the distribution.
I got reminded of the Jerry Sussman quote (taken from the ILC 2002 proceedings):
Computer science is in deep trouble. Structured design is a failure. Systems as currently engineered are brittle and fragile. They cannot be easily adapted to new situations. Small changes in requirements entail large changes in structure and configuration. […]
This problem is structural, this is not a complexity problem. It will not be solved by some form of modularity. We need new ideas, we need a new set of engineering principles implying effectively built, flexible, robust, evolvable, efficient systems.
BTW, fortune can be pretty funny sometimes:
Charlie was a chemist,
But Charlie is no more.
For what he thought was H2O,
Was H2SO4.
I don’t do anything interesting right now. Expect my blogging frequency to lower.
NP: Bob Dylan—Billy 4