Or the Space Shuttle was just a truck with wings that just went vertical. So was it really a leap to have a vehicle that could go around the earth a bunch of times or land on the moon? Software at its most basic level has to do with manipulating 1's and 0's. There is really no significance between them, just whether the circuit has a certain state. Yet we can do a great many things all based on bit-fiddling. And we can do it exceptionally fast with great precision. Are our brains nothing but a bunch of circuits connecting binary memory? I'm not sure but if so, then I think it is conceivable that some day we will be able to create something that matches or rivals the human brain. We first have to understand what we are building though and that is going to take a long time. We just emulate a lot of things right now at the most basic level.
On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 10:38 AM, [email protected] < [email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- Robert Casto www.robertcasto.com www.sellerstoolbox.com -- 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.
