Limbo

Acrobatic dance of West Indian origin, in which the dancer bends the body backwards from the knees and moves under a crossbar with pushing dance steps.

Kent Beck's Limbo – Scaling Development. page

Limbo post is live, shared programming. It balances on a fine line between two principles ("Limbo on the Cheap" via TCR – "test && commit || revert") to scale development for thousands of developers working concurrently on the same Codebase:

1. All work on (and production executes) the same program represented by a single Abstract Syntax Tree. 1. No one should cause problems for others (including users).

Both principles are ideals that must be addressed in sequence.

The changes that propagate through Limbo are transformations of the abstract syntax tree. This promotes a sequence of changes along the lines of "make the change easy, then make the easy change".

To prevent others from encountering problems, changes must be tested quickly and reliably in the field (for those changes that could cause problems).

Limbo is an exercise in learning, hence the dogmatic attitude that everyone works on the same program until it goes into production.

The strongest constraints in one dimension will foster the greatest innovation in another. Even if Limbo proves impractical, trying to achieve it will certainly have valuable side effects.