[extropy-chat] technological equilibrium

[Rik van Riel]

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Adrian Tymes wrote:

> Or perhaps we've simply gotten better at compressing
> information, and *that* is one of the reasons we're
> developing things so fast today.  If it takes you a
> few days to learn a complex topic, where previously
> the fastest option was a college course that took
> months, then it becomes more feasable to incorporate
> said complex topic into a short development cycle

Funny, I tend to think the opposite is true.  A century
ago, somebody could go to university and learn ALL of
physics, and in the 1960's it must have been possible
for a single person to learn ALL of computer science.

In contrast, I suspect there's nobody who knows everything
of either field today...

Rik
-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan