3 ms·
He has a good talk where he shows that the original Smalltalk implementation had IDE, graphics, a word processor, VM, networking features...etc etc in like 10k
by 3rdAccount 8y ago
He has a good talk where he shows that the original Smalltalk implementation had IDE, graphics, a word processor, VM, networking features...etc etc in like 10k lines of code. He then shows how big Microsoft Office is and refers to a visible bug that MS has been trying to fix for 20 years, but they can't find it. The take home idea is that we've made things far more complex than we've needed to.
- baldfat 8y agoComputer Programming was better when there was a constraint on it.Now that chips really can't get much smaller and Moore's Law is effectively dead we are entering a new era of programming. Efficiency is going to be the low hanging fruit for getting better programming solutions. When I look at what was done with the C64, and Amiga I am shocked at what that doomed toy company was able to do. The Amiga was easily 6 years ahead of MS and Apple at the time. Amiga's solution to the constraint is that they gave us custom chips for graphics and sound and we could program to easily. The C64 in Assembly was so simple you really could pretty much have it in your head. If you even look at ID and Doom with 640k limitation it is pretty amazing stuff. Memory became "free" and people just ran with whatever we wanted. Parallel computing is proving to be not the easiest thing to implement but efficient use of memory and cycles will become king of big projects.
- pjmlp 8y agoAt least in Europe where Atari and Amiga reigned for a while, PC Compatibles helped killing the Amiga. If IBM had managed to keep their control over the PCs, the market would have looked much different.