Immutable things.

[Henry G. Baker]

> By making the kernel small, you make
> everything else huge.  What benefit is there to that?
> 
> --David Gadbois

I don't see how this follows.  There isn't a kernel
vs. everything-else philosophy here.  You start with a small,
efficient, easily portable core, and start layering stuff on top of
it.  It grows organically, and upon occasion, may 'reflect' upon its
own lower-level implementation.

Rodney Brooks's 'subsumption'/'layered' architecture for his mobile
robots is not a bad metaphor here.  (He has a web page at MIT, and
various of his papers are available via the AI Lab memo server, but I
don't have the url's off the top of my head.)  BTW, Brooks is one of
the architects of Lucid's excellent Lisp compiler.

-- 
Henry Baker
www/ftp directory URL:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html