Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go. These will be less than we think of Cobol today. The paradigms will be completely different by then. Declarative languages have the best shot at surviving since they are the least tied to today's paradigms. We have to figure a may to program for fine and coarse grain parallel machines -- and not von Neumann fetch-decode-execute st…
"Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?" — John Backus, 1978 44 years later, it hasn't happened. I'm skeptical that it will happen in the next 28.
Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go. These will be less than we think of Cobol today. The paradigms will be completely different by then. Declarative languages have the best shot at surviving since they are the least tied to today's paradigms. We have to figure a may to program for fine and coarse grain parallel machines -- and not von Neumann fetch-decode-execute st…
"Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?" — John Backus, 1978 44 years later, it hasn't happened. I'm skeptical that it will happen in the next 28.
Probably not a complete break. But there needs to be paradigms that can allow for exacale computing. Instead of 20000 independent threads (e.g., SIMD / CUDA style) we will have trillions of threads that work in interleaved harmony. The von Neumann model break downs at that level.
Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go. These will be less than we think of Cobol today. The paradigms will be completely different by then. Declarative languages have the best shot at surviving since they are the least tied to today's paradigms. We have to figure a may to program for fine and coarse grain parallel machines -- and not von Neumann fetch-decode-execute st…
This isn’t nearly so clear-cut as you make it out to be—compilers today often treat “imperative” languages as declarative, and CPUs are a lot more sophisticated than “fetch-decode-execute” implies. (Yesterday I was looking at some code where GCC took a fairly complicated for-loop and turned it into about four assembly instructions, all with incomprehensible acronyms.)
COBOL’s fall from grace was due in no small part to the syntax rather than the semantics, and I expect that trend to continue: I wouldn’t be surprised if the languages of 2050 are similar to the languages of today, just with more expressivity, better communication between compiler and programmer, and an even larger range of optimizations under the hood.
Raise your hand if you would be willing to lower your standard of living, voluntarily, in order to stave off global warming. Sell your car. Stop buying anything made with plastic. Stop using electricity. I don't see many hands.
Never. I'm not changing any part of my lifestyle to prevent any climate disaster. I'm all for technological solution to climate change. In case that's not enough, I'm happy to face the consequences. But I'm still not changing my lifestyle.
I agree that we need to plan for climate adaptation (preparing for predictable problems) and resilience (preparing for unpredictable problems), but I have a few kneejerk responses: - Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction…
> For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization. I'm assuming celsius, not farenheit. I'm curious why a mere 8 degrees increase leads to human extinction. Is that "8 degrees evenly over the globe"? If so, that most certainly would leave the majority of land arable and comfortably livable…
This guy Mark Lynas studied the models and wrote a book about it, but then he wrote it again based on newer models, so make sure to find the latest one called "Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency" for a grizzly drilldown into the centigrades towards extinction. Few models deal with warming beyond three degress, in itself a point of some consideration, but the references are all there and here's the synopsis for the book.
> At one degree - the world we are already living in - vast wildfires scorch California and Australia, while monster hurricanes devastate coastal cities. At two degrees the Arctic ice cap melts away and coral reefs disappear from the tropics. At three, the world begins to run out of food, threatening millions with starvation. At four, large areas of the globe are too hot for human habitation, erasing entire nations and turning billions into climate refugees. At five, the planet is warmer than for 55 million years, while at six degrees a mass extinction of unparalleled proportions sweeps the planet, even raising the threat of the end of all life on Earth.
I don't understand. In this article we are imaging widespread and frequent failure of critical infrastructure and we are supposed to further imagine that we're still interested in working on our relatively unimportant software? I suppose there are critical software systems out there, but they're already written so we don't really need to think about what languages they'll be work on with.
What COVID taught me is that the human ability to not give a fuck is apparently infinite. I have trouble processing the fact that a million people died (in the USA) and there is no mourning, no shared sense of tragedy or loss, no looking more kindly on other people, just a madder, faster dash on cash and even more finger-pointing. > Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. I'll be generous and not…
Something like 5 million people die every year, should we be in permanent mourning?
I know you're trolling, but I'll respond. Part of growing up and moving from just a mere legally-licensed adult is being able to hold heavy things. They never stop getting heavier. They just keep unfolding, and if you are willing to grow just a little deeper--not bigger, but deeper, like the roots of you being able to feel things, then maybe all that learning to deal with loss, tragedies, loved ones dying, aging, your parents and uncles and cousins and friends dying--and yet not letting it destroy you, might be worth something. Though, for a moment, you can be devastated on the inside and hold yourself up without breaking. You don't need to cry your eyes out every day, but man, what the hell if we can't reflect on such a grievous time that has befallen us--all of us--over the past two years, without clawing someone else's face off or storming off in a huff. But if you need to feel not bothered at all, go ahead, you aren't the subject of this one.
> human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization How do you imagine human extinction being an outcome? It seems to me that the worst case scenario is large loss of population which would decrease greenhouse gas output. There would still be some increase in temperature even once we stop emitting, but wouldn't people in colder climates still survive?
There's some fairly absurd doomerism going on in the "climate catastrophe tomorrow" camp where climate change will (somehow) turn earth into a barren rock and we're inches away from triggering a self-reinforcing climate resonance cascade of unforeseen consequences. It's of course a very urgent issue, but I think exaggerating it until it becomes a threat to "all life on earth" levels is a) dishonest b) does nothing to…
Something like 5 million people die every year, should we be in permanent mourning?
I know you're trolling, but I'll respond. Part of growing up and moving from just a mere legally-licensed adult is being able to hold heavy things. They never stop getting heavier. They just keep unfolding, and if you are willing to grow just a little deeper--not bigger, but deeper, like the roots of you being able to feel things, then maybe all that learning to deal with loss, tragedies, loved ones dying, aging, you…
Lately, I've been thinking about the role of nihilism as a natural force in society and its use as a tool of renewal. At its best, it's a power to take only that which strengthens so that we don't take on the collective emotional debt of past generations. It's why we're finding new ways to do old things all the time and why we aren't living in guilt over the deeds of past generations.
At its worst, nihilism throws the baby out with the bath water and you get holocaust deniers. This has been the hardest part of aging for me, because seeing this evolve in real time has left me in despair for our world at times. I have to remind myself that this force has been at work for centuries, and when I was young I didn't think it was all that bad. We'll probably be ok.
I have fear that the cathartic pessimism we sometimes enjoy ironically is turning into a chronic fatalism. It's like a habit that has become an addiction. I think the author was in a discussion that started as a fun catharsis for all involved and then devolved into an addictive argument that the author felt they needed to win. There is a cliché which goes: "Expect the best. Prepare for the worst". Articles like this…
You want to provide a reason based in reality for that level of optimism at the present time? It seems like pessimism is currently warranted absent major upheavals that would change the political situation worldwide, which would bring their own issues.
Life on Earth has survived much, much worse than the burning of fossil fuels. For example, the K-Pg extinction event.
It's all a matter of perspective. But humans are irrationally social creatures susceptible to memetics, so no amount of empirical evidence will alter socially beneficial memeplexes.