BGB <[email protected]> writes: > On 10/2/2012 12:19 PM, Paul Homer wrote: > > It always seems to be that each new generation of programmers goes > straight for the low-hanging fruit, ignoring that most of it has > already been solved many times over. Meanwhile the real problems > remain. There has been progress, but over the couple of decades > I've been working, I've always felt that it was '2 steps forward, > 1.999999 steps back". > > it depends probably on how one measures things, but I don't think it > is quite that bad. > > more like, I suspect, a lot has to do with pain-threshold: people will > clean things up so long as they are sufficiently painful, but once > this is achieved, people no longer care. > > the rest is people mostly recreating the past, often poorly, usually > under the idea "this time we will do it right!", often without looking > into what the past technologies did or did not do well > engineering-wise. > > or, they end up trying for "something different", but usually this > turns out to be recreating something which already exists and turns > out to typically be a dead-end (IOW: where many have gone before, and > failed). often the people will think "why has no one done it before > this way?" but, usually they have, and usually it didn't turn out > well.
One excuse for this however, is that sources for old research projects are not available generally, the more so for failed projects. At most, there's a paper describing the project and some results, but no source, much less machine readable sources. (The fact is that those sources were on punch cards or other unreadable media). > so, a blind "rebuild starting from nothing" probably wont achieve > much. like, it requires taking account of history to improve on it > (classifying various options and design choices, ...). Sometimes while not making great scientific or technological advances, it still improves things. Linus wanted to learn unix and wrote Linux and Richard wanted to have the sources and wrote GNU, and we get GNU/Linux which is better than the other unices. > it is like trying to convince other language/VM designers/implementers > that expecting the end programmer to have to write piles of > boilerplate to interface with C is a problem which should be > addressed, but people just go and use terrible APIs usually based on > "registering" the C callbacks with the VM (or they devise something > like JNI or JNA and congratulate themselves, rather than being like > "this still kind of sucks"). > > though in a way it sort of makes sense: many language designers end up > thinking like "this language will replace C anyways, why bother to > have a half-decent FFI?...". whereas it is probably a minority > position to design a language and VM with the attitude "C and C++ > aren't going away anytime soon". > > but, at least I am aware that most of my stuff is poor imitations of > other stuff, and doesn't really do much of anything actually original, > or necessarily even all that well, but at least I can try to improve > on things (like, rip-off and refine). > > even, yes, as misguided and wasteful as it all may seem sometimes... > > in a way it can be distressing though when one has created something > that is lame and ugly, but at the same time is aware of the various > design tradeoffs that has caused them to design it that way (like, a > cleaner and more elegant design could have been created, but might > have suffered in another way). > > in a way, it is a slightly different experience I suspect... I would say that for one thing the development of new ideas would have to be done in autarcy: we don't want and can't support old OSes and old languages, since the fundamental principles will be different. But then I'd observe the fate of those different systems, even with a corporation such as IBM backing them, such as OS/400, or BeOS. Even if some of them could find a niche, they remain quite confidential. On the other hand, more or less relatively recently, companies have been able to develop and sell new languages/systems: Sun did Java/JVM and it's now developed by Google in Android systems; Apple promoted Objective-C on iOS, both with quite a commercial success, and third-party developers. So one could imagine than after having developped a good kind of language and system, a corporation could embed them in a user plateform with some commercial success, and the corresponding popularity amongst third-party developers. Then once you're a billionaire, you also have this opportunity, beside backing Ubuntu or Mars colonization. Let's keep our optimism! -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
