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Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

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Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#31

Post by perfmode »

erikj wrote: post #8
perfmode wrote: post #7

Is it theoretically impossible to fit an interpreter for a dynamic programming language in the L1 cache of a modern chip? (I understand there are physical constraints that prohibit super low-latency memory lookups (of unconstrained size) in 0+epsilon time (where epsilon is small))

Symbolics managed to fit their Lisp VM into the cache of DEC Alpha processors in the early nineties: http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html

Thanks for the information.

> We built a prototype of the emulator in C, but it quickly became obvious that we could not achieve the level of performance desired in C. Examination of code emitted by the C compiler showed it took very poor advantage of the Alpha's dual-issue capabilities. A second implementation was done in Alpha assembly language and is the basis for the current product.

First pass in C. Final, in Assembly.

Chip at the time was a first-generation DEC Alpha AXP 500 which had a 512 KB B-cache and two 8 KB caches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha

Let's say its present day and you want to fit into a 256K L2. What language toolchains are available? How far can one go with JIT?

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#32

Post by gutnor »

kmicklas wrote: post #19
lsd5you wrote: post #11

This is a distinction I first learned about working in france years ago. Without any real basis I wondered whether it is their general more precise use of language which made it a more obvious distinction for a french person to make. At the time they were more or less synonyms for me, but since then have become very distinct especially when talking about software!

> their general more precise use of language This isn't really true, it's just a snobby idea the French have somehow successfully convinced us of. (It goes along with the idea that they have the most "refined" culture or something).

A lot of the specific term in English comes from the common French vocabulary and are still very (very) close to the common words in the French spoken today. The common vocabulary in English comes from German origin. Actually I think you can basically speak about anything using only German origin words.

In order to learn French and its vocabulary, English speaker will found a lot of similarity but from the more formal side of their vocabulary. That would lead English speaker to think French is more precise, I don't think the French have something to do with this.

That's BTW a common mistake English speaker make when evaluating some French speaker proficiency. The fact that I use rarely used words does not mean that I have a large vocabulary, it is just the opposite.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#33

Post by nickpsecurity »

eternalban wrote: post #15
chadcmulligan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same thought, if he had a solution then he should have it by now.

His critical error is evident in his comparative analysis that places Physics and Programming on the same level. The systems that underly natural sciences are givens . The entire kettle of soup of software complexity boils on the fact that software engineering must first create the 'terra firma' of computing. That is the root cause of the complexity in software: it lacks a physics.

There's been numerous logics and unified methods for specifying, synthesizing, or verifying software. The problem wasn't that we didn't have one. The problem is intrinsic complexity of the domain. It leaks through in all the formalisms where the formalism gets ugly if you want to automate it and it gets clean only with much manual labor.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#34

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

I haven't watched the video yet, so please forgive the possibly premature comment... But this is something that I've found myself thinking about a lot lately. Are the things that we're currently building or maintaining truly that complicated or are we over-engineering things? I've been humbled on more than one occasion where I initially thought an enterprise-y solution was over-engineered, until all the details of the problem were explained to me.

What I wish we had was a "man" equivalent to provide every-day examples of how to use the tool "correctly" (although I'm aware there's stuff like "bro" pages), as well as another tool to explain why some tool / option even exists and how they're "expected" (by the creator / maintainers) to be used. As I've gotten into the habit of reading man pages I've become increasingly aware of how many options certain tools provide, but in many cases I really cannot fathom why those options are available or in what kind of situation they might be used.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#35

Post by jacquesm »

derefr wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with a huge barrier to entry. Smalltalk is at least reasonably easy to grasp for people new to programming, Erlang not so much (though it is incredibly powerful). The graphical nature of the Smalltalk environment also really helped to make it accessible. Erlang lives mostly in text terminals. I'm still not convinced of the 'image' mechanism, it's really nice to have implicit and automatic persistence but it glues…

> Erlang lives mostly in text terminals. People (outside of Ericsson) just haven't bothered to take much advantage of Erlang's strengths. Erlang speaks network wire protocols very efficiently, so if you want graphical Erlang sessions, you just need to write Erlang applications that act as e.g. X11 clients. Which is what things like Erlang's own Observer application does, complete with the ability to use the graphics…

After long searching I've settled on python for hardware control, number crunching and ML stuff (it's really just wrappers around C libraries and GPU kernels) and Erlang for everything else. So far no regrets. I wasn't aware of that software, thank you for the pointer!

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#36

Post by goatlover »

derefr wrote: post #30
jacquesm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with a huge barrier to entry. Smalltalk is at least reasonably easy to grasp for people new to programming, Erlang not so much (though it is incredibly powerful). The graphical nature of the Smalltalk environment also really helped to make it accessible. Erlang lives mostly in text terminals. I'm still not convinced of the 'image' mechanism, it's really nice to have implicit and automatic persistence but it glues…

> Erlang lives mostly in text terminals. People (outside of Ericsson) just haven't bothered to take much advantage of Erlang's strengths. Erlang speaks network wire protocols very efficiently, so if you want graphical Erlang sessions, you just need to write Erlang applications that act as e.g. X11 clients. Which is what things like Erlang's own Observer application does, complete with the ability to use the graphics…

Then this could work for Elixir as well, which seems to be a little more approachable for the majority of programmers.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#37

Post by goatlover »

stcredzero wrote: post #16
goatlover wrote: post #2

I wonder what a Smalltalk-like environment would look like if had been developed in the 2000s instead of the 1970s. If you could marry up the advantages of text/files, live code, visual layouts, data visualization and perhaps machine learning in the future, maybe you could come up with a huge jump in productivity and being able to handle complexity.

If you could marry up the advantages of text/files Is that really such an advantage? What kind of advantage does having source code scattered in files have over Smalltalk's Change Log? The Change Log greatly simplifies having live code, and having a runtime environment where you could crash the system with a runtime change. Source code in text files complicates this. It's also a powerful development tool all by itsel…

I mean in being able to generate source code as text files at any point, or update from text files, since that's what programmers are used to, and there are so much of the tooling is built around that. You're not going to be putting an image on github.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#38

Post by jnordwick »

buzzybee wrote: post #12
goatlover wrote: post #2

I wonder what a Smalltalk-like environment would look like if had been developed in the 2000s instead of the 1970s. If you could marry up the advantages of text/files, live code, visual layouts, data visualization and perhaps machine learning in the future, maybe you could come up with a huge jump in productivity and being able to handle complexity.

I believe Red[0] is closest along to practically realizing this concept by focusing on compositions of small languages, a premise Alan Kay also worked on with the STEPS project at VPRI[1]. The main thing that stops people from beelining down this path is the sheer quantity of yak-shaving involved. We're all impatient and have near-term goals, and glue-and-iterate gets us there without having to engage in a non-linear…

Trying to find a short REAL Red example (not Hello World or here's how to show an alert), and I can't seem to find one. Can you help me out? Something that would help me understand what the language is like.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#39

Post by eli_gottlieb »

gutnor wrote: post #32
kmicklas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their general more precise use of language This isn't really true, it's just a snobby idea the French have somehow successfully convinced us of. (It goes along with the idea that they have the most "refined" culture or something).

A lot of the specific term in English comes from the common French vocabulary and are still very (very) close to the common words in the French spoken today. The common vocabulary in English comes from German origin. Actually I think you can basically speak about anything using only German origin words. In order to learn French and its vocabulary, English speaker will found a lot of similarity but from the more forma…

>In order to learn French and its vocabulary, English speaker will found a lot of similarity but from the more formal side of their vocabulary. That would lead English speaker to think French is more precise, I don't think the French have something to do with this.

Worse, the French apparently teach young students to write in a way that they consider profound, and the Anglosphere considers imprecise drivel.

Re: Is it really “Complex”? Or did we make it “Complicated”? (2014) [video]

#40

Post by macinjosh »

elviejo wrote: post #29
eternalban wrote: post #6

Alan Kay has had about a few decades to empirically demonstrate that "we" have willfully made it complicated. I don't believe he has done so.

I think Javascript,nodejs, electron and HTML and CSS demostrated that "we" have made things complicated.

This is the first thing that came to my mind while watching the video. Web development has become so overly complicated. I believe it is mostly due to working around limitations of the platform and the lack of a de facto standard of how web development should be done. In contrast for smartphone development, largely speaking, the way to do it is the way Android and Apple provide. The web has no single vendor to dictate that and what we have now is a result of that.
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