X-Message-Number: 12722
From: "John Clark" <>
References: <>
Subject: The Nanotech Fantasy
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 12:23:03 -0500

In  #12710 On Thu, 4 Nov 1999 Charles Platt <> Wrote:

    >I remind everyone that virtually no substantial breakthrough has been
    >made in coding efficiency during the  past 50 years,

That's not quite true, a lot of progress has been made. The trouble
is that as our programming tools get smarter our ambition gets larger
too and we write more complex programs, so it never gets any easier.

In 1946 with the original "Eniac" if you wanted to change the program you
had to change the plugs in a vast patch panel. Turing's "Colossus" built
earlier didn't even have a path panel, you had to get out your soldering iron.
A programmer didn't write code, he wrote about what wire should go where.
Later when computers had stored programs you could get rid of the patch
panel, but you still had no high level computer language, or even a decent
assembler, so you had to have detailed knowledge of every aspect of the
hardware you were writing for, the sort of knowledge only circuit designers
worry about now, and everything you wrote was in zeros and ones. Needless
to say programs were very simple by today's standards. All these tasks still
need to done, but now a machine does the job and we can just forget about
them. Imagine if today a programmer was confronted with a patch panel the
size of the Himalayas and told to change the patches so the machine acted
like Windows NT. It could not be done.

     John K Clark     

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