We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
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Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
#2The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. Programmer skill will become more important in the future. But they won't be today's skills. I expect that programming in the future will be more about getting the AI to do what you want rather than writing code directly.
Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
#3What the future holds is hard to grasp, the piece shared with me yesterday was "we'll spend the next decade removing features, at no loss to functionality"
One of the biggest pieces of bloat I've seen is doing the same thing in multiple places, and the new feature not being an improvement over the old workflow in 90% of cases, the efficiency gained 10% was lost in the other 90%
Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
#4The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. Programmer skill will become more important in the future. But they won't be today's skills. I expect that programming in the future will be more about getting the AI to do what you want rather than writing code directly.
I’m already an AI you can pay to get a computer to do what you “want”; the problem is ‘what you want’ is so poorly specified, there’s no way to turn it into an actionable set of steps!
Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
#5What will be probably most interesting to watch: the collision between hardware constraints and ever-increasing complexity of standards like Unicode and HTTP.
Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
#6If you look at the volume of software that needs to be produced, and at the trend to include software in more products, and at the entrepreneurial imperative that risk capital is the most expensive resource, it looks very unlikely that handcrafted machine instructions will play a greater role in the future.
Cloud computing and SaaS have extended the deadline for coming up with an answer to "What comes after Moore's Law." But it is much more likely to not be based on every coder learning what us olds learned 40 years ago. Instead, optimization is more likely to get automated. Even what we call "architecture" will become automated. People don't scale well, and the problem is larger than un-automated people can solve.
Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
#7The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. Programmer skill will become more important in the future. But they won't be today's skills. I expect that programming in the future will be more about getting the AI to do what you want rather than writing code directly.
Agreed. Hopefuly a fusion between prolog and haskell comes by - a modern declarative language to end all languages. Let it decide what's best for cache locality and profile your performance. Let it choose the best data structures based on your constraints - compile time and maybe runtime.
Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
#8The renewed interest in C++ and other compiled languages is an indication of the need to get more efficient. Programmer skill will become more important in the future. But they won't be today's skills. I expect that programming in the future will be more about getting the AI to do what you want rather than writing code directly.
It seems to me that if we can merge https://github.com/Syniurge/Calypso into LDC, we can get a language that is easier to understand and compiles faster than C++, Dlang.
Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
#9Every few years something like this gets written. I remember similar things being written in 2004-2005 before the Core 2 line of processors came out.
There is still improvements being made to the current tech or new takes on the current tech that aren't incorporated yet in the current bunch of consumer processors.
Also I happen to think that what makes a computer fast is the removal of bottlenecks in the hardware. You can take quite an old machine (I have a Core 2 Quad machine under my desk) slap in an SSD and suddenly it doesn't feel much slower than my Ryzen 3 machine.
Re: We’re approaching the limits of computer power – we need new programmers
#10I just don't buy this. I cut my teeth as a HPC programmer working with C and writing no-lock algorithms. There will always be a need for that, but realistically the vast majority of software being developed is simply not performance-critical. It's designed to work at human speed.
Advances in language, compiler, and runtime implementations will continue to keep up with any growth in the need for performant applications for the foreseeable future, despite the looming collapse of Moore's Law.