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Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 06:39:24 -0400
Message-ID: <CAJHLa0NmYjP-fxJFN1dXwAV94Hv9tixAAPeEddH-ukq02aYZpg@mail.gmail.com>
From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay.com>
To: Martin Sustrik <sustrik@250bpm.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Cc: Bitcoin Development <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Revisiting the BIPS process, a proposal
Precedence: list

Yes.  I had pointed people in IRC to Knuth's literate programming, as
an example of how we might document bitcoin.


On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 3:03 AM, Martin Sustrik <sustrik@250bpm.com> wrote:
> On 23/10/13 23:07, Pieter Wuille wrote:
>
>> In short,
>> consistency is more important than correctness.
>
> That's a nice and concise way to put it and any potential protocol
> documentation should start with a statement like that.
>
>> However, I do not think that making it hard to find information about
>> the details of the system is the way to go. Alternate implementations
>> are likely inevitable, and in the long run probably a win for the
>> ecosystem. If effort is put into accurately describing the rules, it
>> should indeed carry a strong notice about it being descriptive rather
>> than normative.
>
> One interesting question is whather alternative implementations are more
> likely to get it wrong because the protocol description is wrong or
> because the authors misunderstood the reference implementation source code.
>
> Extensive documentation of the source code, a la Knuth's literate
> programming, may be some kind of a middle ground.
>
>> If someone is willing to work on that, I am (and likely many people in
>> #bitcoin-dev are) available for any questions about the protocol and
>> its semantics.
>
> Ok. Several people expressed an interest in the topic, so I'll give it a
> try and see how it fares.
>
> Martin
>
>
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-- 
Jeff Garzik
Senior Software Engineer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/