4 ms·
Honestly there is a bit more than that. The idea of mass development with large, open ended access to code is actually a surprisingly recent idea. Plus of cou
by urthor 5y ago
Honestly there is a bit more than that.
The idea of mass development with large, open ended access to code is actually a surprisingly recent idea. Plus of course Stackoverflow has significantly changed the approach.
Concurrent programming is also significantly different to its 1960s iteration. COBAL and Fortran did not even attempt to do such a thing, the handling of all those asyncs was not around.
Many many other architectural details have also been implemented that were specifically designed not to be exposed to give classically trained programmers the illusion that things under the hood have not changed. However, they have significantly. Branch prediction leaps out at me, but also many other forms of evaluation, memory and processor design.
There is more than you describe that has changed.
If you would say that compilers and parsers have not changed, that would be extremely accurate. But there's a bit more to the world on either side of the compiler.
- kqr 5y agoMaybe the nature of our concurrency problems has significantly changed, but from what little I remember, I don't think so. More people attempt to design for concurrency now, but shared memory, actors, barriers etc have been around at least since the early--mid '70s. Do you really think branch prediction has significantly reduced the difficulties in developing software, or altered the way software developers work? Bringing up things that have changed behind a compatibility layer that makes us program against an emulated PDP-11 sounds to me like support of my thesis, if anything: the only changes to the way we work are faster computers and higher level languages.
- int_19h 5y agoConcurrent is not quite the same as async, though. If we're talking about async - especially the most common modern variety which is basically coroutines with some syntactic sugar - then it first appeared in mid-1960s in Simula. Although I don't think it was used much then.