<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Apr 30, 2006, at 8:18 AM, Robert Bradbury wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><BR><DIV><DIV> 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.) <BR></DIV><BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>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. </DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV><BLOCKQUOTE class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><DIV style="direction: ltr;"> 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.<BR> </DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR>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). <BR></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>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. :-)</DIV><BR></DIV><DIV>- samantha</DIV></BODY></HTML>