Re: suitability of CLOS for large KB

[Gregor J. Kiczales <gregor@parc.xerox.com>]

   Date: Thu, 12 Jul 90 19:12 EST
   From: <BALL%YALEMED.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
   X-Original-To:  commonLoops.PA@xerox.COM, BALL

   I recently received a reviewer's comments concerning a manuscript
   I submitted describing an application of PCL in the domain of
   molecular pathology. In these comments was the criticism "CLOS is
   NOT well suited to the development of very large knowledge
   bases." Does anyone disagree or should I accept this as
   constructive criticism?

This comment is too terse for me to agree (or disagree).  About all I
can say about it is I don't understand it.  Part of the problem is that
I don't understand whether the emphasis is supposed to be on `very
large', `knowledge bases' or `development'.  I have tried making sense
of it all three ways and can't.

Perhaps you can find out more just what was meant?  Or maybe you already
have enough context to provide us with some more interpretation.  One
thing which might help would be to know what, if anything, the reviewer
was implicitly comparing CLOS to?  Were there specific problems this
comment was in response to?  Was the comment really about CLOS, or about
a specific implementation (you mention PCL but I don't know about the
reviewer, and I would hope that no one in a position to review papers
would make the mistake of confusing PCL with CLOS in any of these
dimensions).

In general, I can't imagine accepting a comment like this one as
constructive criticism without having both a clearer picture of exactly
what was meant, and being told what the evidence was to support the
claim.

There are a number of people, many of them on this mailing list, who
have successfully used CLOS in very large systems, in development
situations, and in knowledge base systems.  Some of them have even done
development of very large knowledge base systems.  Perhaps if we can
learn more about what this comment was intended to mean, the experience
of those people can be brought to bear on the problem of evaluating its
correctness and relevance to your situation.