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Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

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Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#11

Post by asciilifeform »

abalashov wrote: post #3

I've been having that exact thought for quite some time now. It seems that the art of programming - or at least, the practice of it, equivalent to "proficiency" or "competency" - has shifted from fundamentals of the machine and the language's intrinsic semantics, which allowed you to actually create something anew, to spending 90-95% of the time trying to figure out someone else's API. In other words, the real skill…

Much of my blog is devoted to precisely this subject. (See for instance: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=16)

I believe that the only solution to the complexity plague is a from-scratch reboot of all of computing.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#13

Post by pmorici »

My opinion may be in the minority here but I think the crux of this article is misguided. It's like a farmer saying, "I long for the days before the combustion engine because I love planting 3 acres by hand".

I also think the two basic premises of the article are just plain wrong. There are plenty of examples where people have written their own operating system from scratch for the x86, there have been articles posted on HN describing as much. So to say that todays processors are "to complex to understand" is just wrong. On the assertion that programming has devolved into "learning another man's APIs" that's just a fact of engineering I suspect the Z80 had a thick manual describing all of it's interfaces and inner workings. The AVR micro controllers I've worked with, the same ones on the Ardunio the author says is still "fun", have a manual that is over 320 pages long describing in effect the processor's API.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#14

Post by jacquesm »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #9
abalashov wrote: post #3

I've been having that exact thought for quite some time now. It seems that the art of programming - or at least, the practice of it, equivalent to "proficiency" or "competency" - has shifted from fundamentals of the machine and the language's intrinsic semantics, which allowed you to actually create something anew, to spending 90-95% of the time trying to figure out someone else's API. In other words, the real skill…

I know where you're coming from, but I wonder if this observation is just a classic language rant waiting to be born. In other words: I wonder if the problem is not that all higher-level APIs necessarily suck, but that the ones you have suck, and your language platform is too impoverished to profitably work around that. API design is hard . It's like composing poetry, or trying to design the game of chess. ("I know,…

jquery is a good example to use, I've only been into it for a couple of days now (after asking on HN what would be a good js library), and after a few days I already like what it does:

It hides the mess!

Most software is so absolutely messy. Just the other day there was an argument that it is perfectly ok to see the user interface that results from interpreting a spec'd document as an approximation. Computers are supposed to be deterministic, you're supposed to get exactly the results you want and not something 'good enough for government work'.

Elegance breeds excellence, bloat breeds badness. Cellphones that crash (who would have ever accepted that), computers that need to be periodically reinstalled and APIs that have manuals 10 times the size of the operating system components they interface to.

Complexity is a given, so, then we should strive to make the complex simple, instead of more complex.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#15

Post by jgrahamc »

pmorici wrote: post #13

My opinion may be in the minority here but I think the crux of this article is misguided. It's like a farmer saying, "I long for the days before the combustion engine because I love planting 3 acres by hand". I also think the two basic premises of the article are just plain wrong. There are plenty of examples where people have written their own operating system from scratch for the x86, there have been articles poste…

I disagree. That would the case if I were to say: "Please take away this Mac Pro and all the wonderful software because what I really want is a Z-80".

I'm not saying that today's processors are too complex to understand, I'm saying that the software running in the machine in front of me is too complex. I wouldn't mind writing assembly code for a modern processor at all.

But if we are talking about what's likely to make me happy, it's probably a relatively simple CPU, some I/O ports and a soldering iron.

That's probably like the farmer wishing a had a kitchen garden and was growing enough food for himself.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#16

Post by jacquesm »

asciilifeform wrote: post #11
abalashov wrote: post #3

I've been having that exact thought for quite some time now. It seems that the art of programming - or at least, the practice of it, equivalent to "proficiency" or "competency" - has shifted from fundamentals of the machine and the language's intrinsic semantics, which allowed you to actually create something anew, to spending 90-95% of the time trying to figure out someone else's API. In other words, the real skill…

Much of my blog is devoted to precisely this subject. (See for instance: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=16 ) I believe that the only solution to the complexity plague is a from-scratch reboot of all of computing.

I share your belief. At the same time I think it is going to be like trying to replace the automobile piston engine with something better.

The amount of money and time invested in the way we do things today is going to be a very large stumbling block to overcome in order to create a clean slate.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#17

Post by Retric »

rbanffy wrote: post #8
Retric wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is still plenty of work to be done on impeded systems for sensors and other simple devices. Some of theses systems are powered by a watch battery for years, they might have more or less processing power than an apple II but far less ram which tends to limit code bloat. EX: A new 8 bit CPU from 2008: The triple clock enables the selection of the most suitable clock frequency from 32.768 kHz, 500 kHz, and 4 MHz a…

Don't confuse powerful with power-hungry

It's just physics. For a given transistor, more transistors @ higher frequency = more power. At the ultra low end people are using processors that run using energy collected from stray radio waves. While a better design and instruction set help unlike desktop computing the standard is already lean.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#18

Post by Goladus »

pmorici wrote: post #13

My opinion may be in the minority here but I think the crux of this article is misguided. It's like a farmer saying, "I long for the days before the combustion engine because I love planting 3 acres by hand". I also think the two basic premises of the article are just plain wrong. There are plenty of examples where people have written their own operating system from scratch for the x86, there have been articles poste…

It's quite probable that x86 processors are more complex than they need to be-- at least, the instruction set is more complicated than is necessary. CISC architectures are meant to make life easier for assembly language programmers, letting you do things like load, multiply and store in a single command. In practice that hasn't been all that valuable, because programmers just use higher level languages like C when they need that much expressive power. From a compiler perspective, it's easier (or at worst about the same) to generate code for RISC than CISC, and RISC has much more flexibility with regards to automatic optimization, pipelining, etc.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#19

Post by Mintz »

"Don was responsible for the LM P60's (Lunar Descent), while I was responsible for the LM P40's (which were) all other LM powered flight". Two men were able to write all that code and understand its operation.

Is this probably why we don't use more advanced technology for space flight today; it's too complex? I've always wondered just how much more we could accomplish if we used modern computing technology in space shuttles, but if safety is of the utmost important, maybe the complexity is a bad thing?

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#20

Post by rbanffy »

Goladus wrote: post #18
pmorici wrote: post #13

My opinion may be in the minority here but I think the crux of this article is misguided. It's like a farmer saying, "I long for the days before the combustion engine because I love planting 3 acres by hand". I also think the two basic premises of the article are just plain wrong. There are plenty of examples where people have written their own operating system from scratch for the x86, there have been articles poste…

It's quite probable that x86 processors are more complex than they need to be-- at least, the instruction set is more complicated than is necessary. CISC architectures are meant to make life easier for assembly language programmers, letting you do things like load, multiply and store in a single command. In practice that hasn't been all that valuable, because programmers just use higher level languages like C when th…

"quite probable" here is, perhaps, the biggest understatement ever presented on HN. Within every Core i7 is a Pentium M, within which is a Pentium, a 486, a 386, a 286, a 8086 and most of a 8085. The PC architecture is no better. I bet that, buried deep in the Centrino Duo notebook I use to work, there is a vestigial ISA bus that has to be primed before the text screen can be written to and the scan rate matched to an imaginary CGA monitor.
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