On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 10:44:16AM -0700, Nathan Blackham wrote: > Without futher ado: > http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html
Intersting. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I do appreciate his point. 20 years ago, I had a compiler, interpreter, operating system, and maybe an assembler, all in 8 Kb. 12 Kb on 32 bit processors. It ran in as little as 16 Kb, but I preferred 24 Kb. I could port it to a new processor in a few weeks, and once I had the processor down I could put it on a new computer in as little as an hour. The source code fit on a DSDD floppy, along with editors, assemblers, the cross compiler (it was self hosting), decompilers, single steppers, disassemblers and other tools. Oh, and a few games. And an IDE. This was not a toy. I made my living writing fun things like dimmer boards and microprocessor development stations with it. I understood it. Far better than I understand any of the tools I use today. I could go in and tweak it, and know the implications of doing so far better than the implications of tweaks I make today. That system also took an unusual approach to programming. If you write the code to run, say, a washing machine, in C or Java, you write a washing machine in C or Java. But what this tool kit let me do was write a language for writing washing machines in. Then writing the actual washing machine would be easy, less than a page of code, because you're writing it in a washing machine language. "rinse" is a verb in the language you're working in, not the name of some function or object. I didn't care about functions or objects; I just wanted to get those clothes rinsed. Bloat? There was none; you can't afford bloat when you only have 8 Kb of ROM space and the processor is something brain dead like an 8080. -- Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
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