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Ovid (2709)
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Stuff with the Perl Foundation. A couple of patches in the Perl core. A few CPAN modules. That about sums it up.
God's Epiphany
Cat sitting for a friend. Forgot to bring a book or my laptop. Mind starts wandering. It starts wandering back to an earlier conversation where I'm explaining to someone that Perl is not C and trying to program in one while thinking in the other is difficult and leads to error prone code.
The I started thinking about Widge. Widge is also falling into the "not spectacularly fast" category because
I now realize not only what I was doing wrong, but what I need to do right. By being away from the code, I started thinking in terms of Perl. I started envisioning how I would code it if I was coding it from scratch, which is what I'm going to do. I now know the system well enough that I no longer need any code to refer to. The neural network is crystal clear (admittedly, it's a simple network) and the eyes are ridiculously obvious
I'm wondering if I can get an article out of all of this when I'm done. I really need to start writing.
I pour myself a cup of strong coffee. :-)
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
Now you're getting it (Score:3, Funny)
You've figured out what's so damn hard about computing. We have high-level revelations that we turn into algorithms, but we have low-level hardware. It's hard to spell out one into the other.
So.... Let's make the hardware smarter! Oh, wait, that was the '70's idea: VAX opcodes, smart assembler. That didn't go very far.
So.... Let's make the translator smarter! Oh wait, that's what RISC was going to do in the '80's: super-smart compilers against cheap, dumb hardware. Well, that kinda panned out, but not really....
So.... Let's just live with the difference, and make the hardware faster! Yes, the '90's and '00's superscalar processors, the multi-gigahertz chips. That's the ticket. Or is it...?
As you've found, it's still hard. The real impedance mismatch is between our creative brains and our constructive hands, and it hasn't been crossed yet.
Wonder what the '10's will bring.
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Re:Now you're getting it (Score:2)
Wonder what the '10's will bring.
Perl 6? :)
Seriously, I think something really needs to change in the world of computing. Testing is what's really helped to push me there. Specifically, once I started realizing that we can't just know how to build good software, I started thinking harder about this problem, but I am Bear of Little Brain and I don't have a solution for it. I realized that tests (particularly acceptance tests) are an ad hoc method of ensuring program correctness. They do not, howeve