This analogy isn't making it for me, unless you want to claim that today's ships are really just updated schooners, and freight trains are just modern refinements to the iron horse. If you're going to go that far, you might as well say that a plane is just a truck with wings - that's closer to the mark than either of the other two claims! And in that case, nothing has changed in shipping, any more than it has in programming, so what is your analogy buying you?
To me, the analogy works the other way around. Take shipping as practiced in, say,1900. Bring in containers and multi-modal shipping and letting the user do the data entry and stuff like that, and our current shipping infrastructure looks a lot like the old one, just with a few refinements - a few refinements which, taken together, change the game entirely. Just as the little refinements in programming have changed the game entirely, even though at bottom we're still moving bits from here to there and back. ----- Reply message ----- From: "Vince O'Sullivan" <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Dec 8, 2011 9:56 am Subject: [The Java Posse] Re: Joshua Bloch joins the Dart team as core libraries architect To: "The Java Posse" <[email protected]> On Dec 8, 1:57 pm, Kevin Wright <[email protected]> wrote: > It's like roads really. We still lay down surfaces for them, and sit in > something with wheels and a source of locomotion. Yes indeed, a pickup truck is basically a better horse and cart in the same way that Scala is a better Fortran. Programming by having a programmer "manually" defining what needs to be done to each piece of data is a bit like requireing all transport to go by road. (At the risk of hammering the analogy into the ground) there are alternatives to roads that can take you to places that roads cannot (e.g. ships, planes and rockets) but little indication that the same can be done in computing (i.e. the possibility of creating software at a level of abstraction where the developer isn't writing stuff like "let x = 1" or "var x = 1" or whatever the latest language's variation is.). -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
