UNIX admin wrote:
And we've progressed... how exactly?
Look at Google Sketchup for a great example of the virtues of being able to spend developer energies on 2nd and 3rd order features like intuitive ease of use and great tutorials rather than on counting bytes in rendering subroutines. It is all about costs. Back in your C64 days, hardware was expensive and coding time cheap - or at least cheaper than non-existent hardware. Now, with a couple of 2Ghz processor cores and a few GB of RAM, not to mention 3d hardware graphics engines, outboard IO processors and ubiquitous network bandwidth on a $2k laptop, look at what Apple has been able to produce. Those 200 byte BASIC interpreters and 48 byte renderers etc are now relegated to custom silicon - BASIC-Stamps and GPUs - that are good enuf for the rest of us. Case in point: My first programming job was to support an engineering lab system - running a 4Mhz Z80 with 48KB of memory. It cost about $10k back in 1980. We spent significant time and effort optimizing code so that students could use the system to solve 5x5 and 6x6 arrays of simultaneous equations, instructors could manage grades and the rest of us could simply hack and have fun. Nowdays I can buy a Microchip PIC processor development kit with more processing power than that system for about $100; the all-in-one processor in it runs about $6 (I use several dozen to run my model train layout...). Our daughter has a $60 TI graphing calculator of her own that blows the socks off of that old Northstar Horizon system. Do I care that she isn't learning to microoptimize assembly code on a Z80? Hell no - she is off exploring trig, calculus, graphical analysis of complex systems, robotics and the like. So what if she "burns" all the resources of her Macbook doing inefficient things like Sketchup, iTunes, Java and Robotics? Or if I "burn" a whole PIC doing nothing but driving a few turnouts on my layout? Thats what they are for - tools to learn and build greater things. Besides, next year things will be faster and cheaper still. Is the glass half empty or half full? -John _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
