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One of the aphorisms I operate by is that when the order of magnitude of a problem changes, the appropriate solution to that problem may also need to change. H
by hinkley 1y ago
One of the aphorisms I operate by is that when the order of magnitude of a problem changes, the appropriate solution to that problem may also need to change.
Here we are sitting at four to seven orders of magnitude separated from Knuth, depending on whether you mean number of devs or number of machines or size of problems tackled.
- kragen 1y agoSize of machines is pretty amazing. The PDP-10s and 360/67s Knuth was talking about in 01974 were about 1 MIPS (with 32-bit or 36-bit operations) and could scale as high as 16 mebibytes of RAM. Today you can put 6 tebibytes in a 384-core two-socket AMD server that can do in excess of 10 trillion 32-bit operations per second: 6 orders of magnitude more RAM, 7 orders of magnitude more arithmetic. But that's really understating the case, because those were large shared mainframes. Today's equivalent would be not a 2-socket rackmount server, or even a whole rack, but quite plausibly a whole data center, three more orders of magnitude. 9 orders of magnitude more RAM, 10 orders of magnitude more arithmetic. Probably also worth mentioning that the absolute number of computers has also increased a lot; every USB-C power brick contains a multi-MIPS computer. I agree that the number of devs has increased by only about four or five orders of magnitude. In 01974 I'd guess there might have been 50,000 programmers; my grandparents took programming classes around that time involving batch submission of punched cards, and that was a reasonably common thing at US universities. Today, Roblox has 380 million monthly active users; what percentage of them write their own games in it? And the popular programming environments Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets have over a billion users each.