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Message: [QUOTE="Walter Roberson, post: 2408857"] :This is progress, the language is dynamic, always changing and progressing. :Without this, we end up programming by decade old rules on machines far more :capable than the ones the rules were written for; in effect holding back :progress in the very industry we support. That is more or less BS. The last I read, researchers still aren't able to hold more than 3 quantum transistors stable simultaneously -- so unless you want to count DNA programming (which does actually work, if you are willing to get into wetware), then you are still firmly in the realm of Turing Completeness, which can be summarized as "Anything that can be computed in one sufficiently powerful logic system can be computed in any other sufficiently powerful logic system." "Machines" are NOT "far more capable" than 20 years ago: they are only far -faster- (and have some interesting extensions to their I/O interfaces.) :Hardware reaches new generations :in a matter of months, *Snort*. Continents reach new positions "in a matter of years". Read the durned press releases about inventions like new transistors and computing on amorphous silicon: the usual timeline to take them out of the lab into *any* product is a minimum of 5 years, and the usual timeline given before they expected to find their way to any kind of consumer product is a decade. It's the old story about the singer that toils in obscurity for 25 years before becoming "an overnight success". What you see is the Pop Culture of electronics, not the Practice! Practice! Practice! that proceeds it. :many programming languages are still essentially :where they were in the early 80s. Where software once drove hardware, :demanding progress, we are now approaching a point where the situation is :reversing... hardware is now driving software. It would be a mistake to not :keep up. This is known as "The Software Deficeit". Hardware -is- getting faster (but with much much higher time latencies than you are observing), and it is true that software is not keeping pace. This is a signficant concern to some very bright people and is being actively investigated. It is, though, not entirely clear to me that the situation is capable of a meaningful solution. People thought they had the answer with "4GL", Fourth Generation Programming Languages, which were supposed to be simple enough thta "even managers" could write code, with all the details being taken care of by the compiler. The result was, of course, a lot of very bad code, and and the recognition that large programs *are* complex and that the best that was really being done was to remove a constant factor from the complexity analysis, rather than reducing the inherent complexity. I have to ask whether you are perhaps expecting too much. In Newton's time, people were able to create a machine that broke one treelimb in two pieces over the course of hours -- long enough that one could be there to catch half of it. After Watt's invention of the steam engine, and after Ford's essential implimentation of standardized parts (based upon earlier proposals), we are now at the point that we have machines that can grind an entire large tree into shavings within a matter of minutes. Tree-destroying hardware has progressed. Do you feel significant concern that Evolution hasn't seen fit to speed up human reactions to the point where we can still catch half of those output in our bare hands over a matter of minutes? :Moreover, having worked in Delphi and done a test run with c++ I'm pretty :sure OOP is not the way to do this. It's not better, it's just easier. :Underlying all those fancy visual design tools and object methods is still a :procedural core upon which the CPU itself relies. C still underlies C++, :Pascal still underlies Delphi. That procedural languages are not :progressing in the forefront of programming is, ummm, disappointing. Well, I can tell you that adding a true String type to C would not have made any signficant difference towards that end. Modern procedural languages do not have significantly more expressive power? That's like saying that Predicate Calculas should be retired because it hasn't advanced significantly since Goedel's Completeness Theorem of about 1933. The essential logical elements required for programming were invented a long time ago, and haven't advanced signficantly because they were shown to be logically sufficient. It's like the transition from DFA (Deterministic Finite Automata) to NDFA (Non-Deterministic Finite Automata) -- it might look wonderful on the surface, but it turns out only be able to express the same things after all. For software to "advance" markedly would require that something be discovered that could not be computed with what we have now -- the equivilent of finding that we have to go to LALR(1) grammars. Except that Goedel and Turing and Church-Rosser have shown that there *isn't* anything like that waiting out there for us, not until we get into either infinities (traditional computing is not very good at producing infinite answers in a finite time), or into non-deterministic computations. Do you know what the most common solution is for "fixing" "The Software Deficeit" ? It is producing standardized library toolkits to act as "building blocks" for programs, so that people can fit together standardized, debugged, well-understood tools instead of having to write from scratch so much. And the odd thing about the mass toolkit/building-block approach is that it relies *heavily* upon standardization, upon nailing down every last behaviour and saying "Things will mean this one thing and this one thing only". Which is the opposite of what you are advocating -- you want evolution through the gradual adoption of non-standard components, whose meaning and API gets defined by historical accident and historical pressure rather than being rigerously defined by a group dedicated to producing precise and logically coherent foundations. The "evolution and common adoption by the masses" approach has already been tried: that's a capsule summary of the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems ("You can't make us publish API's, that would reduce our capacity to innovate!"). The fobiles of MS Windows are legendary (but unfortunately, not mythical.) If the future of computing is more of the same, more of MS Window's way of operating, then IMHO computing would be in -serious- trouble. [/QUOTE]

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