[extropy-chat] Optimal computer configurations [Was: Commentary: Does Karl Schroeder's opinion reallymatter?]

[Samantha Atkins]

On Apr 30, 2006, at 8:18 AM, Robert Bradbury wrote:

>
>  Functionality is an interesting topic.  It took us ~20 years to go  
> from C to Perl and another decade to get to Python and Java.  And  
> though I don't claim to know the last two my limited awareness  
> doesn't point out significant differences between them and C.  (Yes  
> one doesn't have to handle memory allocation but of course that can  
> lead to memory fragmentation which leads to the problems one can  
> currently encounter in Firefox.)
>

The second oldest general computer language, Lisp, is more advanced  
in capabilities than any of the so-called "modern" languages.    
Decades ago all the capabilities of the newer languages were hashed  
out and explored in Lisp.   The best technically loses in the  
marketplace again and again.  This is what you learn if you around  
the software industry very long.

> Serious workloads like simulations always need more computing  
> power, but the people running them don't have the money to pay for  
> chip factories at several billion a pop. It all comes down to the  
> people writing programs like Firefox and Doom 3 to put the power to  
> mass use - let them be praised, not criticized.
>
> Hmmm... Go ahead and make the case that Firefox is contributing to  
> computer architecture development will support cheap  
> simulations...  I doubt it can be done.  Anything you suggest that  
> Firefox is doing driving the limits of the hardware I would suggest  
> may be an unconscious and unnecesary waste of resources (I haven't  
> heard about people complaining about Opera being so problematic).

A friend of mine proposed the [mostly] joking theory that hardware  
progress is being driven by programmers needing more and more  
powerful machines to get much done with seriously retarded languages  
and tools.   It took more and more power and memory to debug and  
profile the resulting mess.  Given better hardware larger and less  
efficient systems were designed that then needed ever more powerful  
hardware to debug and maintain them.  :-)

- samantha
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