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RAM really is a harmful kludge. Neither Turing machines nor lambda calculus call for some of an algorithm's state to suddenly be obliterated. The only reason we
by prodigal_erik 14y ago
RAM really is a harmful kludge. Neither Turing machines nor lambda calculus call for some of an algorithm's state to suddenly be obliterated. The only reason we put up with it is that disk and SSD are so much slower.
- rwallace 14y agoSpeed is not the only benefit of RAM. The internal data structures of most programs are gnarly messes of intertwined pointers, fragile, easily corrupted, hard to upgrade in place, almost impossible to fix when they break. The division between RAM and disk forces everything to be serialized at intervals to clean storage formats that can be reread for a fresh start. As a practical matter, that's a big enough benefit to justify enforcing the division at an API level even if disk were as fast as RAM.
- prodigal_erik 14y agoThe industry might produce less worthless crap without the crutch of "it's not quite unusable if you start over often enough".
- TylerE 14y agoI've never understood the obsession with Turing machines. It's like basing one's core belief of what a car is off one of Da Vinci's crazy wind-up things.
- cma 14y agoRam is just state. Turing machines require a non-tape state machine mechanism. You could consider ram a part of that, 4 gigs corresponding to many many possible states.
- saurik 14y agoSome people (I do not agree with this view) believe that applications should be universally persistent: so that they never "stop running" and never "lose data" even when the machine restarts or even if the programs are transferred between systems.