Miles Fidelman a écrit :
Loup Vaillant wrote:
De : Paul Homer <[email protected]>
If instead, programmers just built little pieces, and it was the
computer itself that was responsible for assembling it all together into
mega-systems, then we could reach scales that are unimaginable today.
[…]
Sounds neat, but I cannot visualize an instantiation of this. Meaning,
I have no idea what assembling mechanisms could be used. Could you
sketch a trivial example?
You're thinking too small! The Internet (networks + computers +
software + users), RESTful services, mashups, email discussion threads,
.... - great examples of emergent behavior.
"Emergent"? Beware, this words often reads "Phlogiston". (It's often
used to "explain" phenomenons we just don't understand yet.)
The examples you provided are based on static standards (IP, HTTP, SMTP
—I don't know about mashups). One characteristic of these standards
is, they are _dumb_. Which is the point, as intelligence is supposed
to lie at the edge of the network (basic Internet principle that is at
risk these times).
Your idea seemed quite different. I had the impression of something
_smart_, able to lift a significant part of the programming effort. I
visualised some sort of self-assembling 'glue', whose purpose would be
to assemble various code snippets to do our bidding.
Note that we have already examples of such things. Compilers, garbage
collectors, inferential engines… even game scripting engines. But those
are highly specialized. You seem to have in mind something more general.
But what, short of a full blown AI?
I see small because I see squat. What kind of code fragments could be
involved? How the whole system may be specified? You do need to program
the system into doing what you want, eventually.
Loup.
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