4 ms·

Quibble: I disagree about 'no smartphones.' Look at what is possible on a 64K/8-bit machine in the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_s

by api 10y ago

Quibble: I disagree about 'no smartphones.' Look at what is possible on a 64K/8-bit machine in the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) An iPhone could be done on a single core 100mhz system if code is efficient. That would mean forfeiting some amount of eye candy and developing more efficient GUI layers. I do agree that some smart phone functionality like super-high-end 3d maps apps might not exist, but a basic map with basic turn-by-turn directions could be built for the Commodore 64 by programmers who actually think about performance. This is why I think a "Software Moore's Law" and performance is going to matter a lot. Premature optimization might no longer be the root of all evil. It might be a skill programmers need to have.

berntb 10y ago
An interesting argument. Well, a phone with Emacs as the OS/gui? Given a good chording keyboard, I could have lived happily ever after with that. (But premature optimization is still evil. First you make it work, then you make it fast. Preferably using better algorithms. There is a lot of experience with this.)
akuma73 10y ago
I agree here with the word "possible". However, progress on this front would be slow due to the increased cost of software development. Software would be much more difficult to write leading to longer lead times for applications. I don't think the app stores would scale at the same rate that it did for iPhone or Android. One analogy is parallel programming. This is generally very difficult, so people avoid it, even when hardware vendors give you get a bounty of cores. Another example is GPGPU - very slow progress on mapping data-parallel apps to the GPU (image processing etc.). We may not know what future devices and applications are not possible due to Moore's Law's end. Another example is the recent explosion in deep learning - this was only possible due to the increase in FLOP density as a direct consequence of Moore's Law. These algorithms were around in the 80s.
- api 10y ago
  "Software would be much more difficult to write leading to longer lead times for applications." This is a problem we will need to solve. So far we've increased programmer productivity by sacrificing code efficiency because Moore's Law gives us more speed for free. We'll have to find ways to reduce this trade-off in the future by thinking harder and deeper about software since the hardware's not going to save us anymore.

by api 10y ago

berntb 10y ago

An interesting argument. Well, a phone with Emacs as the OS/gui? Given a good chording keyboard, I could have lived happily ever after with that. (But premature optimization is still evil. First you make it work, then you make it fast. Preferably using better algorithms. There is a lot of experience with this.)

akuma73 10y ago

I agree here with the word "possible". However, progress on this front would be slow due to the increased cost of software development. Software would be much more difficult to write leading to longer lead times for applications. I don't think the app stores would scale at the same rate that it did for iPhone or Android. One analogy is parallel programming. This is generally very difficult, so people avoid it, even when hardware vendors give you get a bounty of cores. Another example is GPGPU - very slow progress on mapping data-parallel apps to the GPU (image processing etc.). We may not know what future devices and applications are not possible due to Moore's Law's end. Another example is the recent explosion in deep learning - this was only possible due to the increase in FLOP density as a direct consequence of Moore's Law. These algorithms were around in the 80s.

api 10y ago
"Software would be much more difficult to write leading to longer lead times for applications." This is a problem we will need to solve. So far we've increased programmer productivity by sacrificing code efficiency because Moore's Law gives us more speed for free. We'll have to find ways to reduce this trade-off in the future by thinking harder and deeper about software since the hardware's not going to save us anymore.