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
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