Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Erik Naggum lets loose a rant that I wish I had let loose. It is in the
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This is the fault of the programmers themselves. Instead of being the movers and shakers of the next millennium (that's this one, so pardon the hackneyed terminology), programmers have allowed themselves to be blue-collar slaves of the most idiotic adventure ever -- yet another stupid way to waste gargantuan amounts of money on advertising, and for what? Youth envy? Obsessive fear
I knew it! Those lazy programmers. So, Andrew? Why haven't you coded our strong AI yet? Step to it! Humanity is waiting! :)
But seriously, I've been reading about Lisp and the Lisp Machine and the Connection Machine and such things lately. All ideas ahead of their time IMHO. Perhaps their time is coming? The early days of computers sold us some pretty big ideas and then they turned out to be much harder than we thought to accomplish and we are still bitter about it. The AI winter is a very hard pill to take.
I think the technology continues to mature and the things we were promised in the early days are still waiting to be born. I keep thinking about the massive parallelism of the Connection Machine and wondering how many really simple cores with a bit of RAM I could fit in a modern FPGA and whether a purely functional language like Haskell might somehow let us easily take advantage of all of that parallelism. But the problem is: What sort of algorithm might I possibly program that could not be executed in a traditional serial cpu (although perhaps in greater time) that isn't just some combination of everything Knuth et al have already mastered and thoroughly described? So maybe we can break the von neuman bottleneck and build a bunch of cpu's with some RAM with each one: What do we know how to do with such beasts? Not much it seems. I think the problem here may be that programming as we know it isn't the answer. Whoever solves the real problem may not be a programmer.
I agree about being blue collar slaves though. I'm not sure where I will go someday after I get tired of my current gig. I'm tired of making other peoples dreams come true. My next gig is going to have to be some sort of serious start-up of my own making or co-making.
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