Harry Pollard wrote:
Chris,
Before MSDos. there was CP/M (from which MSDos was copied).
The maximum size of a program was 64k - now too many are approaching
Gigabytes.
Yet programmers did a great job with that 64k. Brad, perhaps with all
that space that's now available, programmers can afford to be redundant?
[snip]
This is the old problem of "programmer productivity".
Higher level programming language were supposed to not
just make programmers more productive but also to deskill
programming work, so that management would no
longer be held hostage by skilled labor.
It seems to me that the effort to deskill programming
has largely been abandoned, as "structured programming"
(top down design, hipos and walkthrus -- the improved
programming technologies of 1980) have given way
to "object oriented programming", which is very
difficult to master and easy for persons who don't
understand it in depth to screw up.
But even here, the principle remains that
labor is expensive and machine cycles are
cheap. There surely is a lot of truth to this --
contrast when ENIAC was such a Leviathan that
when they powered it on the lights dimmed in
part of Philadelphia.
I honestly do not know the answer to highly complex
programming projects -- although I would try more
social engineering to see if we could reduce the
need for such highly complex computer systems at all.
The currently most popular "heavy-duty" programming
langauge, "C++" is truly Kafkaesque. And after
doing Java for 3-1/2 years, I still find a lot of
it obscure -- and Java is C++ stripped of many of
its worst features.
I vote for more social engineering, for more
*real* systems analysis. Joseph Weizenbaum
addressed this point when he said that by
enabling existing social organizational structures
to keep going when the volume of data to be processed
exceeded what could be handled by human clerks and
therefore would have otherwise precipitated
a breakdown or breakthru in our form of social life --
that
there has been no computer revolution and
the computer has been one of the most powerful
forces for social reaction in the 20th century.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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