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

jgc.org

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

#31

Post by wwalker3 »

I think the completely comprehensible system has always been an illusion. There's always some cutoff level below which people don't understand (or don't care to understand) the system they're working in.

The old Apple 2 hackers had a great understanding of assembly, but that's because it was the top level of the system to them, the stuff they worked with daily. I doubt most of them understood the PLA that decoded the instructions, or the behavior of the dynamic NMOS logic inside the 6502.

The 6502 instruction set was essentially the API of the processor, and it wasn't above reproach any more than current software APIs are. Many people wished for different addressing modes or additional instructions to simplify common coding tasks.

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

#33

Post by limmeau »

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 believe the complexity comes inevitably with code reuse and abstraction. Once you've got your ethernet driver working, you discover that your routable point-to-point packet exchange is useful in many places, so you extract an IP component, and before long, you're writing web applications in a high-level framework in a dynamic programming language again.

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

#34

Post by jacquesm »

mhb wrote: post #32
jacquesm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you ought to post that invidually, that's a really neat hack.

Didn't get any love: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741639

I think a big factor in that is when something gets posted and whether or not it gets traction immediately. If that doesn't happen it will be gone before someone notices.

I completely missed it yesterday. The 'new' page gets filled up so fast sometimes it's not even funny. And that's when ignoring the spam. One thing that would help here is a minimum delay before the same user can post another link.

Your comment here got more 'points' than the original posting.

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

#35

Post by limmeau »

wwalker3 wrote: post #31

I think the completely comprehensible system has always been an illusion. There's always some cutoff level below which people don't understand (or don't care to understand) the system they're working in. The old Apple 2 hackers had a great understanding of assembly, but that's because it was the top level of the system to them, the stuff they worked with daily. I doubt most of them understood the PLA that decoded the…

However, the relation between how much is there to know (increasing) and how much fits in a head (constant) is growing, which is sad, and whether it has ever been 1 seems rather unimportant to me.

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

#36

Post by tyvkiuiyi »

anamax wrote: post #26
Goladus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> RISC has much more flexibility with regards to automatic optimization, pipelining, etc. Folks designing processors haven't believed that since before the Pentium was introduced. (I went to dinner with some of the MIPS principals right after the first Pentium tech talk. Their conclusion was that everyone would finally figure out that the RISC/CISC wars were over and they'd lost.) There are lots of things that go int…

Tell that to the people at ARM who ship 10 RISC cpus for every Intel desktop chip out there.

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

#37

Post by jgrahamc »

jacquesm wrote: post #34
mhb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't get any love: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741639

I think a big factor in that is when something gets posted and whether or not it gets traction immediately. If that doesn't happen it will be gone before someone notices. I completely missed it yesterday. The 'new' page gets filled up so fast sometimes it's not even funny. And that's when ignoring the spam. One thing that would help here is a minimum delay before the same user can post another link. Your comment here…

I have reposted it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743583

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

#39

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

Thank you for that, that echoed my own thoughts better than I could have ever put them into words. My frustration with the amazing amounts of bloat that you have to deal with in order to do the simple stuff knows no boundary. A PIC chip has more power than the machines that made Apollo 11 possible, I wonder if with todays technology we'd be tempted to go for some 'high tech' solution and mess it up because of that. I…

You'd get an old PC from your closet, install Linux (text only) and gcc and get the whole thing working in less time and for less cost, probably.

...at least that's what I'd do :-)

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

#40

Post by scott_s »

The fact that a single person can understand a smaller percentage of the whole of a computer system indicates progress.

There was a time when any given physicist probably had a good grasp on most of their field. I doubt that's still the case. I do sympathize with the romantic notion of knowing it all, but let's not confuse this notion with a call to action.

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