4 ms·

We all see the elephant in different ways. For me the major milestones were: FORTRAN IBM's Timesharing OS (the 1st step in personal computing) The end of "G

by cc101 4y ago

We all see the elephant in different ways. For me the major milestones were: FORTRAN IBM's Timesharing OS (the 1st step in personal computing) The end of "GOTO" The desktop user interface The creation of a huge library of available frameworks. The World Wide Web. The internet existed, but was ignored. Object Oriented Programming I guess the final milestone was the fragmentation of the computer world. No one can now encompass everything. No event can now rank as a milestone in so wide a field. I'll give props to machine learning, but I don't understand its eventual impact. Perhaps it represents a whole new genre on par with the computer world itself.

heresie-dabord 4y ago
ubiquitous encryption -- people are typically transacting every day with their data protected
moloch-hai 4y ago
OOP turned out to be trivial, in the end: a trick to get better-performing runtime binding.
- ido 4y ago
  The mainstream paradigm before OOP wasn't functional, but procedural programming (like in c or pascal). Going from procedural to OO as the default mainstream programming model is not trivial and mostly not about performance (but about the organisation of code).
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    But in practice, as I said, trivial. Paradigms are also trivial. A good modern language supports all "paradigms" -- styles, really -- equally, and unholy mixes of them, because problems don't sort themselves out neatly according to CS fads. If you are failing to mix up styles according to dictates of problems, you are fielding suboptimal designs, cramming problems into shoes that fit badly.
didgetmaster 4y ago
The Internet was not ignored before the WWW, but it was simply inaccessible to the masses because only highly trained computer users could navigate it using tools that required specialized knowledge. The web opened the Internet to the masses who could point and click their mouse on hyperlinks in a browser. It only took a few minutes for people with little computer knowledge to learn to navigate around the web.
- cc101 4y ago
  It certainly was ignored at the USGS where the Information System Division threatened to remove it unless people started using it. It was ignored because there weren't compelling applications. When the web arrived, it was an almost instantaneous success.

by cc101 4y ago

heresie-dabord 4y ago

ubiquitous encryption -- people are typically transacting every day with their data protected

moloch-hai 4y ago

OOP turned out to be trivial, in the end: a trick to get better-performing runtime binding.

ido 4y ago
The mainstream paradigm before OOP wasn't functional, but procedural programming (like in c or pascal). Going from procedural to OO as the default mainstream programming model is not trivial and mostly not about performance (but about the organisation of code).
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  But in practice, as I said, trivial. Paradigms are also trivial. A good modern language supports all "paradigms" -- styles, really -- equally, and unholy mixes of them, because problems don't sort themselves out neatly according to CS fads. If you are failing to mix up styles according to dictates of problems, you are fielding suboptimal designs, cramming problems into shoes that fit badly.

didgetmaster 4y ago

The Internet was not ignored before the WWW, but it was simply inaccessible to the masses because only highly trained computer users could navigate it using tools that required specialized knowledge. The web opened the Internet to the masses who could point and click their mouse on hyperlinks in a browser. It only took a few minutes for people with little computer knowledge to learn to navigate around the web.

cc101 4y ago
It certainly was ignored at the USGS where the Information System Division threatened to remove it unless people started using it. It was ignored because there weren't compelling applications. When the web arrived, it was an almost instantaneous success.