When I look back to 1995, when I got my first computer, an old 80286, previously owned by my uncle, a machine barely younger than I was (with me being born in 1986) - I have a measure for three decades of technology. 16 MHz to something in the order of 4 cores with around 2 GHz each makes seven orders of magnitude (base 2, not base 10) on frequency and nine orders if you count the cores. If you just extrapolate that, you're not far off, with exchanging the GHz for THz (and the TB for PB). But - the crazy exponential curve has flattened, in the last 8 years there was not even a doubling (compare the first generation i7 with the latest; same amount of cores, 3.0 vs 4.3 GHz - not factoring in cache).
What I want to express: it seem's to me that the "free lunch period" provided by the exponential development of the hardware's capability might be over.
And while Moore's Law might let us down, Wirth's law ("software gets slower faster, than hardware gets faster") seems to hold. May I say, that to me this would constitute a bleak outlook indeed. Even more bleak than the prospect of Cobol running financial transactions in the year 211 CE.
I will still be more than half a decade away from retirement by then, but I certainly hope, that - all fads aside - the field of software development aims for and achieves more than just incremental steps on the status quo until then. By piling up masses of rubble by sheer force, you might get pyramids, but you get neither cathedrals nor skyscrapers.
But one thing still holds true, and I hope will do so at least until 2048, the most interesting time to be a developer is and up to this day has always been the present.
PS: On that one I lol'd really hard: "one solo open source project i found on github had a bunch of random thoughts about cheese scattered throughout it."
This article was actually quite satirical, as you probably detected. In reality, I've always doubted we'll get anywhere near to the specs that the "future author" referred to, because I agree with your assessment. The point I was making was basically that, no matter how fast we make computers, we'll probably always waste that speed and capacity by default.
In a way, the future I painted here is rather dystopic; it represents that pile of rubble that you mentioned in the Alan Kay reference. I actually speak in depth about this topic in my talk, The Cake Is A Lie (and I use that Kay quote in there, btw).
I certainly didn't miss the satirical nature. Good satire, as well as dystopian or utopian texts, provides a great opportunity to use it for reflection.
I've skimmed the first of the four articles you wrote, on which you base your Cake talk. I liked it also and'll look into it a bit deeper the next days!
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Great article, Jason!
When I look back to 1995, when I got my first computer, an old 80286, previously owned by my uncle, a machine barely younger than I was (with me being born in 1986) - I have a measure for three decades of technology. 16 MHz to something in the order of 4 cores with around 2 GHz each makes seven orders of magnitude (base 2, not base 10) on frequency and nine orders if you count the cores. If you just extrapolate that, you're not far off, with exchanging the GHz for THz (and the TB for PB). But - the crazy exponential curve has flattened, in the last 8 years there was not even a doubling (compare the first generation i7 with the latest; same amount of cores, 3.0 vs 4.3 GHz - not factoring in cache).
What I want to express: it seem's to me that the "free lunch period" provided by the exponential development of the hardware's capability might be over.
And while Moore's Law might let us down, Wirth's law ("software gets slower faster, than hardware gets faster") seems to hold. May I say, that to me this would constitute a bleak outlook indeed. Even more bleak than the prospect of Cobol running financial transactions in the year 211 CE.
I will still be more than half a decade away from retirement by then, but I certainly hope, that - all fads aside - the field of software development aims for and achieves more than just incremental steps on the status quo until then. By piling up masses of rubble by sheer force, you might get pyramids, but you get neither cathedrals nor skyscrapers.
But one thing still holds true, and I hope will do so at least until 2048, the most interesting time to be a developer is and up to this day has always been the present.
PS: On that one I lol'd really hard: "one solo open source project i found on github had a bunch of random thoughts about cheese scattered throughout it."
This article was actually quite satirical, as you probably detected. In reality, I've always doubted we'll get anywhere near to the specs that the "future author" referred to, because I agree with your assessment. The point I was making was basically that, no matter how fast we make computers, we'll probably always waste that speed and capacity by default.
In a way, the future I painted here is rather dystopic; it represents that pile of rubble that you mentioned in the Alan Kay reference. I actually speak in depth about this topic in my talk, The Cake Is A Lie (and I use that Kay quote in there, btw).
I certainly didn't miss the satirical nature. Good satire, as well as dystopian or utopian texts, provides a great opportunity to use it for reflection.
I've skimmed the first of the four articles you wrote, on which you base your Cake talk. I liked it also and'll look into it a bit deeper the next days!