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> It certainly qualifies as "software." What possible definition of "software" would exclude a web application? My point was that it doesn't do heavy algorithm
by thiefmaster 15y ago
> It certainly qualifies as "software." What possible definition of "software" would exclude a web application?
My point was that it doesn't do heavy algorithm lifting, processing etc. It's not a phong shading ray tracer or anything.
It's moving data around, storing it and displaying it. It's mostly plumbing work - getting data from one place to another.
- dagw 15y agoI'm sure I could write a simple phong shading ray tracer faster than I could build a copy of this web site. Re-implementing a well known and well understood algorithm is easy, making a working and popular application that people enjoy using is hard
- zck 15y agoIn pg's ANSI Common Lisp, he defines a ray tracer in one page of code, creates all the necessary functions for spheres in another page, then inserts 28 spheres and prints out the world in a dozen lines of code. There's part of a page of utility functions, like creating a point structure. You can examine the code here: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/acl2.lisp http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/acl2.lisp . Search for the first instance of "surface".
- baddox 15y agoI don't know anything about ray tracers, but if it's an algorithm, then it's "mostly plumbing work" in the same way you say a web application is. The beauty of the world we live in is that you can compute anything that can be computed with an absurdly small set of basic operations.