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Re: Sending an interrupt to the frontend?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg127415] Re: Sending an interrupt to the frontend?
• From: Ralph Dratman <ralph.dratman at gmail.com>
• Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2012 01:04:32 -0400 (EDT)
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Michael,

I understand your point about "bad programming," but must respectfully
disagree. I am only asking that the front end remain responsive to a
user interrupt, no matter what else happens. It already has a very
nice menu item to stop evaluation. Why should such a command ever
fail, or be shown as disabled?

This is not magic, but ordinary system-level programming. It may
amount to just a few hundred lines of code, causing no loss of
performance whatsoever. There are probably a dozen technical people at
Wolfram who are perfectly capable of fixing the problem.

Anyway, perhaps I am not being quite as harsh or negative as you
think. A bit of direct talk is necessary in this case. I would not be
writing anything at all if I did not like Mathematica as much as I do.

Ralph



On 19/07/2012 08:51, Michael Weyrauch wrote:
>> Ralph,
>>
>>      I really would like to understand your critical remarks somewhat
>> better.
>>
>> It is clear that one can easily and quickly run the frontend irresponsive.
>> However, in most cases I know, this is actually due to bad programming
>> (from Mathematica's point of view) rather than an instable product.
>>
>> One typical reason is that a command returns symbolic results where the
>> programmer actually expected only numerical stuff, and quickly things get completely out of hand.  But how should Mathematica know that all this was not intended?
>>
>> It is the tremendous flexibility and the many possibilities which
>> sometims get into the way, and as a consequence the frontend can not
>> handle the output from the kernel any more.
>>
>> I really do not understand where you expect Wolfram to get "its act
>> together". My experience tells me: A good Mathematica program may run
>> for days without any instability. But my stupitidy and/or lasy
>> programming can run it against
>> the wall within seconds. Mathematica as such is definitely not unstable.
>> (of course, sometimes there are bugs as with any other major (and minor)
>> software).
>>
>> Michael