Funny. In my opinion, Labview, too, is an abomination. A truly compositional programming environment should be based strictly on a hierarchical tree. That is to say, the program should look like a tree and should be a branch in the universal tree of all software applications.
Perl is an abomination as a language
LOL. From my perspective, all computer programming languages are abominations. They are ancient primitive relics of what I call the Babbage and Lovelace era. They should all be placed in the Smithsonian right next to the buggy whip and the slide rule. I live for the day when a constitutional amendment is passed to ban them all.
Your momma.
ahahaha...
My stuff speaks for itself. My point was and is that anybody who accuses me of being a crackpot in public should publically identify himself or herself. And yes, it is all about gonads and the lacks thereof. It takes guts to be accountable to one's words.
Ad hominems are personal opinions. They smack of cowardice, especially when they are anonymous. It's a chicken shit way of trying to destroy a message without taking the time and the effort to address it. Opinions are a dime a dozen. A well-formed argument, on the other hand, is priceless.
At least you post with what seems to be your real name, which may take a little bit of gonads. Not what I really would call identifying oneself though, as I'm sure there are many Bill Stewarts out there.
Everybody knows who I am as I am not afraid of expressing my ideas but who are YOU, really? What have you done that someone can associate you with? If you're going to attack me ad hominem, I want to know who you are so I can prepare a proper defense.
The whole space-based power thing is just a science geek's wet dream. It will never happen. You might as well forget about a world powered by wind, sunlight, tides, ocean waves, algae, corn, sugar cane, etc. All that stuff is excruciatingly primitive and will not succeed in the long run.
The amazing truth is that, like fish in the ocean, we are swimming in wall-to-wall energy but we can't see it. Why? Because we are blinded by our current assumptions about how bodies really move. Soon though, all that will change because not everybody is making the same assumptions about motion. A few mavericks are thinking deep thoughts. Get ready for the age of infinite free energy and true zero emissions.
It does not matter. Anybody or organization who comes out with the right solution will start a revolution and the others will be caught by surprise and forced to go along. All it will take is a few kick-ass products like say, a smart phone that instantly translates a japanese restaurant menu into a chosen language, at the click of a button; or one that recognizes somebody's face whose name you had forgotten; or a portable translation service, etc.
Any processor that can support such advanced products will blow everything else out of the water. Such is the promise of parallelism and the radical new software paradigm that will make such applications easy to construct even by amateurs.
My point is that software is about to become practically free and software companies will not be able to compete. Why? Because the next computer revolution will make it possible for customers to very cheaply construct their own software from freely available parts. Oracle is bound to suffer as customers begin to migrate to free applications. By the way, Intel would be surprised to find out that hardware is not profitable.
Oracle must hold on to the hardware division at all costs. The financial future of the computer industry is in hardware, not software. Software will be extremely cheap because necessity is about to unleash a revolution in software construction methodology that will turn every computer user into a programmer whether they know it or not. The future of profits in this industry is going to be strictly about who has the baddest, fastest and most energy-efficient parallel processors. The software will just sprout like mushrooms.
The painful (and scary to many) transition to parallel computing and the crisis that has ensued does not bode well for the status quo. Who would want to spend millions or billions converting legacy software into multi-threaded code only to find out afterwards that multithreading is not the part of the future of parallel computing. The baby boomer generation (the Turing Machine worshippers) whose bankrupt ideas on computing led to this cisis must be forcibly retired even if it creates an uproar. This will allow new minds and new ideas to flourish so that the industry can leap beyond last century's flawed paradigms and forge a new future.
Oracle has an unprecedented opportunity to make a killing by doing the right move. Sun's hardware engineers are a talented bunch and it would be a dumb idea to let them go. But if the sale goes through, I hope HP realizes the importance of hardware and immediately start dumping loads of cash into another big-chip parallel processing project (and please do not resurrect the Rock project).
Having said that, the solution to the parallel programming crisis that will revolutionize computer programming means building a new type of computer to support a radically different programming model. There is no escaping this. Read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis for more on this topic.
In other news, Nvidia's Boss: Kill Your Company a Bit Every Day
I am not saying that Newton was 100% right or that Einstein was 100% wrong. I am saying that Newton was right about gravity being instantaneous and Einstein was wrong about same. That's my take on it and you're free to disagree, of course.
Until and unless physicists can explain gravity from first principles, all they got is Ptolemaic epicycles, IMO. The hard truth is that physicists are just as ignorant about the nature of gravity as the man in the street. A little humility would do them a lot of good.
No, science adjusts models to accommodates new data
You mean, for example, how physicists invent superstitious nonsense like dark matter and dark energy to explain data that contradicts their pet theories (e.g., general relativity)? Of course not. That would be preposterous.
By the way, did any of you know that nothing can move in spacetime, by definition? Surprise! In Conjectures and Refutations, Sir Karl Popper (of falsifiability fame) called spacetime "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens". Popper compared Einstein to good old Parmenides who, whith his devoted pupil Zeno, also maintained that nothing can move and that change was an illusion! And yet spacetime is the central model of modern cosmology. ahahaha...
Folks, the reason that gravity waves have not been found is simple: Einstein was wrong. Gravity is a nonlocal phenomenon and is instantaneous, just as Sir Isaac assumed centuries ago. This is the reason that Newtonian gravity is so accurate. Isn't it time for science to adjust the model to accomodate the data? I think so.
Programming is done with languages because programming is communication. It's communication between programmer and computer.
Sure, this what it is now because the computer, as we know it, was originally invented by mathematicians for mathematicians (Babbage and Lovelace). As we all know, mathematicians are obssessed with algorithms, i.e., language. The truth is that programming, like all activities having to do with constructing something, should be about construction and nothing else. We understand what we want to construct. We should not have to express it it in a language unless we absolutely have to. Construction implies things like building blocks, parts, and effective tools with which to manipulate said blocks and parts. It has very little to do with syntax, keywords and vocabularies.
Rile as much as you want but the future of computing is not linguistic. It is time to move away from the current descriptive nature of programming to one that is purely constructive. This is where things are going and neither you nor anybody else can stop it. Sorry.
Will the huge Minority-Report-touch-screen we'll all have in our homes be a result of this architecture you're describing or will it be a requirement for developing it?
Interesting that you should mention this because I wrote about it on my blog some time ago. Well, it was actually about Jeff Han's multi-touch screen technology, which is the same thing. So yes, I think it will be an ideal interface for the future of parallel programming.
Let me add that the main reason that compositional development tools have failed is that they are inherently algorithmic. What is needed is an implicitly parallel model.
So who do you think will be writing the "components" for your magic system, and the infrastructure to make the system executable, designable, testable and usable? We have been progressing to increasingly high level code (and in some cases, as you say, component architectures), but the amount of code being written and maintained continues to grow, not shrink.
If software apps were purely compositional and organized as a hierarchical tree, the low level components would need to be written only once. Once the bottom levels (mostly leaves) of the tree become populated, then all of the higher level apps will be compositions of existing objects. Plug and play. The trick is in the purely compositional part: everything must be compositional from the bottom up.
So the amount of code is growing, and it does more per unit mass, and software engineering skills are increasingly valuable and applicable, and you think this is a trend towards the elimination of code and software engineers? You may want to check your water and food sources for contamination.
I think it will be the elimination of the traditional programmer, because a time is coming when everybody will be a programmer whether they know it or not. Drag'm and drop'm, that sort of thing.
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah
