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Windowing systems and GUI modules and so on and so on, all give us powerful capabilities but also come with their own conceptual frameworks that need to be unde
by maxander 10y ago
Windowing systems and GUI modules and so on and so on, all give us powerful capabilities but also come with their own conceptual frameworks that need to be understood and plugged into each other. If both the module designers and the engineer of the larger system are working from roughly the same mindset, this is routine work. But if the former and the latter worked on entirely different machines, trained by computer science in wildly different stages of its development, I'm sure things can get much more "fun."
Intergenerational software development will someday be its own sub-discipline, with professors and specialized techniques and everything.
- aboodman 10y agoSee also "software archeology" in the sci fi book _A Fire Upon the Deep_. God I love that book.
- mrob 10y agoSoftware archaeology is from the prequel, "A Deepness in the Sky".
- maxander 10y agoTo be honest, that's precisely what had been on my mind. Did you know Vinge is himself a computer scientist? IIRC, there's a point in A Deepness In The Sky where its implied that the protagonists' interstellar ramscoop ships run a descendant of Unix.
- aboodman 10y agoYeah, I did read that about Vinge somewhere. And I loved that little callout to the unix epoch. And you know, Git would be the perfect source control system for an interstellar species who various settled systems are separated from each other by light years.
- KingMob 10y agoHeh, I'd bet evolutionary pressure means that in the long run, races using DVCS with superior interfaces outcompete ones using Git.