4 ms·
Even earlier, when SMP was hitting the server room but still far from the desktop, there was a similar phenomenon of breaking everything down to use ever finer-
by notacoward 8y ago
Even earlier, when SMP was hitting the server room but still far from the desktop, there was a similar phenomenon of breaking everything down to use ever finer-grain locks ... until the locking overhead (and errors) outweighed any benefit from parallelism. Over time, people learned to think about expected levels of parallelism, contention, etc. and "right size" their locks accordingly.
Computing history's not a circle, but it's damn sure a spiral.
- Something1234 8y ago> Computing history's not a circle, but it's damn sure a spiral. I think that is my new favorite phrase about computing history. Everything old is new again. There's way too much stuff we can extract from past for current problems. It's kind of amazing.
- notacoward 8y agoI wish I could take credit for it. I know I got it from someone else, could have been lots of people, but Fun Fact: one famous proponent of the idea (though obviously not in a computing context) was Lenin. https://platypus1917.org/2011/06/01/lenins-liberalism/ https://platypus1917.org/2011/06/01/lenins-liberalism/ A similar sentiment is that history doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
- vidarh 8y agoLenins views on this comes directly from Marx - it's the concept of "dialectical materialism" (though Marx did not use that term) - and Hegel. Specifically Marx noted in Capital that (paraphrased) capitalist property is the first negation (the antithesis) of feudalism (the thesis), but that capitalist production necessarily leads to its own negation in the form of communism - the negation of the negation (the synthesis) - basically applying Hegelian dialectics to "the real world". In that example the idea is that feudalism represents a form of "community property", which though owned by a feudal lord in the final instance is in practice shared. Capitalism then "negates" that by making the property purely private, before communism negates that again and reverts to shared property but with different specific characteristics. The three key principles of Hegels dialectics comes from Heraclitus (the idea of inherent conflict within a system pulling it apart), Aristotle (the paradox of the heap; the idea that quantitative changes eventually lead to qualitative change), and Hegel himself (the "negation of the negation" that was popularised by Marx in Capital; the idea that a driven by inherent conflict, qualitative changes will first change a system substantially, before reversing much of the nature of the initial change, but with specific qualitative differences). The idea is known to have been simultaneously arrived at by others in 19th century too, at least (e.g. at least one correspondent of Marx' came up with it independently), and it's quite possible variations of it significantly predates both Marx and Hegel as well.
- akvadrako 8y agoA spiral is pretty optimistic; it suggests we are converging on the optimal solution.
- s3m4j 8y agoAssuming an inward spiral ?
- notacoward 8y agoI usually think of it more as a three-dimensional spiral like a spring or a spiral staircase. Technically that's a helix, but "history is a helix" just doesn't sound as good for some reason.
- jonhendry18 8y ago"Computing history's not a circle, but it's damn sure a spiral." If it was a circle we'd have better code and framework reuse. Sigh.