On 4/24/07, Stephen Lau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
UNIX admin wrote: >> I'm glad we've managed to dumb things way down in the >> last 20 years: > ... >> No longer do we need to write in assembly language >> (or machine code or ...)
sure we do. I don't think we will ever get away from the hardware so far that assembly becomes unneeded. Ever. So long as there is software to write and compilers that attempt to convert it to machine executable form then we will need assemblers. After all, someone somewhere always wants to squeeze the last nanosec out of those loops and nothing beats assembly.
> And that's a good thing? That we now have compilers generating bloated code > that make it unthinkable to run a modern GUI?
I hardly think that Studio 11 creates bloated code. In fact, I think that the Sun Studio tools are the finest on the planet for AMD Opterons and UltraSparc. Other processors *may* require other vendors. Or maybe even just GCC. But bloated code starts with the programmers and the software management process in place.
> Hey, I was coding realtime, *smooth* multimedia stuff on a 7MHz processor inside of 16KB worth of assembler code! How much faster would it have been if I had even a 40MHz CPU! Just look at people doing realtime Goraud shading inside a few KB worth of assembler code on a 0.99MHz Commodore 64! > > For crying out loud, we were competing whose depack routine had the least number of *bytes* (48 *byte* depack routine was the record). > > And we've progressed... how exactly? ... and my parents walked to school uphill both ways in the snow barefoot.
http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/cold_feet.jpg :-) I always want to use that in context.
We've progressed to the point that nobody cares and we can think about higher level constructs.
I don't know if that is progress. I often need to scope out the whole process in flow charts and then pseudo code the routines and common interfaces. Often times right down to atomic database operations in order to ensure that a given high level transaction can be depended on when many many such transactions are fed into a service queue. No, I think that programmers still need to see the lower level bits in order to create good solutions.
If you want to stick with the arcane knowledge that you have accumulated, then fine. Nobody is taking that away from you. But don't try and stop progress and development merely because you don't want to know about it, or use it.
I don't know what arcane is. Earlier today I ran headlong into someone reading a MAC address to me and they told me that "ff" means there is nothing in that memory location. They had no clue at all what hexadecimal was and they had been a systems admin for years. I hope that hexadecimal does not fall into the realm of "arcane". If you mean things like how to write 3D graphics software in pascal on the Apollo 10000 Domain/Aegis workstations .. then yeah .. we can flush that down the drain. Dennis ----------------------------------------------------------------------- :: Turbo Pascal rules ! :: _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
