Sun 21 May 2006
Continuations Debate
Posted by dkaz under Java, Smalltalk, Programming
Keeping tabs on the latest continuations debate:
- Gilad Bracha’s post on why Continuations won’t be support in Java
- Tim Bray’s post on why Continuations will not be needed in the near future
- David Meggison’s post on why client-side state should be used to fix the Continuation problem
- Seaside Avi Bryant’s post on why Continuations are, in fact, a good thing
- Curtis Poe’s post on how (Gilad’s) thoughts are constrained by language (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)
- Ian Griffith’s post on web continuations being harmful
I have a bunch of disorganized thoughts on the subject, roughly along these lines:
- whether we use them for the web or not, continuations make for a great feature in any language
- AJAX is great for any interaction that doesn’t need to be bookmarked
- REST is great for any interaction that does need to be bookmarked
- carrying state in hidden parameters (Meggison’s idea) would be an error-prone way to solve a lot of use cases I’m familiar with
- continuations can have a major impact on an application’s memory footprint
- deserializing continuation state can be tricky when dealing with versioned objects
