Larry Price wrote:
> > Are you sure? Moore's law, as originally stated, is that the number
> > of gates on a chip doubles every 18 months. It looks to me like the
> > number of {lines of code, function points, bytes of memory used,
> > whatever} is increasing at a similar rate.
>
> I was thinking more in terms of the performance increase[...]
But that was my point. Moore's Law says nothing about performance.
It only predicts device density.
It's true that hardware designers, in mainstream computing, have used
most of the additional components to increase performance. Software
designers have used the additional capacity to add functionality
instead.
> But how much of that demand is cultural, I haven't done even a cursory
> census but from my experience I'm guessing that a clear majority of the
> software on my box is devoted to conversions between different data
> formats, encoding schemes and High-level instruction sets.
A lot of it is. But is that bad? How much would it slow down the
advance of technology if ANSI, ISO-CCITT, and the AFL-CIO had to agree
on a file format before you could write the EUGLUG geek code?
> And now of course I'm thinking about that quote, "Software is a Gas it
> expands to fill the space available."
I think that viewpoint is way too cynical. How about, "Software is a
universal problem solver; it will expand until all problems are
solved." (Okay, that's too optimistic. Somewhere in between. (-: )
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
