to quote nikola Tesla — "If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack,
he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine
straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory
and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labour.
(Nikola Tesla, New York Times, October 19, 1931)
likewise msr torvalds — you advocate stable processors — elegance be damned.
true enough, stability is paramount for reliability — but it is also important to
not preserve a perverse or arcane standard.
knowing what features to consolidate and prune can save a great deal of useless
backwards compatibility work, and save labour down the road.
two examples: i) we could do well to learn from the feat of the late s.jobs — where he
was able to poll the developers about what APIs they were actually using — and
prune out a bunch of dead CRUFT, and leave a core set of stable APIs (the now
defunct CARBON) that would bridge developers — by tweaking a little code,
they could gain the benefit of the new OSX architecture, while maintaining
backwards compatibility. ii) the move from parallel printer, and PS2 style
keyboard and mouse vs the move to USB — it was wise to eliminate multiple
incompatible standards which were being used in wrong ways (parallel printer
ports being used for ZIP drives!?!?) — total USB and elimination of legacy ports
was a good call.
instead of MONOLITHIC & CRUFTY — lean and well-defined.
please.
2cents from toronto island
jp