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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
God's Epiphany
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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