Computing from 1976

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Mon Jan 1 07:15:15 CST 2018


    > From: Peter Corlett

    > since we have computers with multiple gigabytes of RAM, it makes little
    > sense to restrain one's use of them to a fraction of the capabilities,
    > except as an intellectual exercise.

For data, sure. (It's amazing how big even images can become, as the
resolution is increased. And that's not even video!)

For code, however, there are very good reasons to think that 'more is _NOT_
better'. More code means more complexity, and that has a host of Really Bad
consequences: harder to understand, more likely to have bugs, etc, etc.

It also often means that unless you have the Latest and Greatest hardware,
the machine is simply too slow to run the latest bloatware. The machine I'm
typing this on has a 1.4GHz single-core CPU, and _most_ things run on it just
fine - but going to many Web sites is now painful, since the 'obligatory'
HTTPS (another hot button, one I'll refrain from hitting right now, to keep
the length of this down) makes even simple Web operations slow.

	Noel


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