On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 7:03 PM, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote:
--- On Tue,
2/9/10, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
> Probably a lot. ?In the earliest days, assemblers were considered a poor use
> of time on the machine.
Assemblers were NOT considered poor use of
machine time - totally the
reverse. ?Assembler programmers had to know what they were doing though and
for that I was paid more. ?It took far less time to assemble a program in
BAL that compile a COBOL program. ?The down side was it took a lot longer
to write.
I'm pretty sure that Ethan was talking about the attitudes in the mid-1950s,
when assembler languages were born.
Yep. Assemblers vs Machine Code, not Assemblers vs High Level
Language Compilers.
I did say "the earliest days". Sorry for not assigning a year to that.
?He is correct that at the time, the use
of assembler languages was controversial, because so much precious computer
time was wasted doing something that any good programmer ought to be able to
do at his desk.
That is the attitude I was recalling.
*Every* generation of programmers has *always* looked
down on their successors
as using tools that waste too much computer time to do too little. ?Of course,
*my* generation (started programming in 1969 on a 1401) is right. ;-)
I certainly agree with you in principle, but I still wonder why even
non-GUI application bloat has to be as bad as it is. We used to put
25-40 users on an 8MB VAX before it would start to swap. Now, still
using a character based interface (which happens to be ssh vs direct
serial connect, but that doesn't affect CLI application size), a
program to tell me what processes are active on the system is 8MB by
itself, vs a few dozen K bytes (I should go back and dig out one of
those programs from the old days and port it to a modern machine to
compare library bloat vs application bloat. Fortunately, I have my
backups from 25 years ago).
This is C code then and C code now, 80x25 then and 80x25 now. UNIX
then and UNIX or Linux now. 32-bit processors then, 32-bit processors
now. Not quite apples to oranges like most comparisons reaching back
that far across the generations of equipment and mentalities.
25+ years later, how far have uber-fast machines with uber-large and
uber-cheap storage really gotten us? Not as far as the raw numbers
might lead one to think. I can buy a machine that about fits in my
pocket that has 500 times the memory, 500 times the storage, and has a
clock that's nearly 500 times faster for 1/500th the cost* - a
250,000X price-performance advantage. I think quite a bit of that
500x multiplier is getting pissed away before I type a single
character. Yes it can do more; yes it feels faster. That much
faster? Not in my opinion.
-ethan
* Numbers based on 1984 stats for a VAX-11/750 w/RA81 - approx $150K,
integer speed approx the same as 8MHz 68000, 8MB RAM, 450 MB of disk,
compared with a modern portable 3.6GHz machine w/4GB of RAM and 250GB
of disk for under $400. Some settling may have occurred in shipping.
Post No Bills, etc.
-ethan