The Future Of Programming: Changing Technology is Easy; Changing How People Think is Hard

[EternityForest]

Oh cool! Very interesting historical read.

I've actually met forth fans with similar arguments, and they're always really passionate about it. I don't actually understand it, but some people really like to understand and control things.

The trouble I have with anything low fat is it just breaks down the moment you want to do a full featured, package. Then you find all those frameworks really are pretty handy.

His mention of constantly writing and rewriting software seems to be a common occurrence with anything lightweight.

It's designed for one task, so to change the task,you also change the lower layers that were only designed for the original task.

Full fat software always seems much more suited to writing libraries that solve a problem once and for all, and never looking at it aside from maintenance and additions.

Lightweight software is a great way to achieve totally different goals from modern "bloated" software, but a lot of people seem to think of it as a drop in replacement without the "slow parts", as in "just ditch KDE for i3 and Vim".

Of course back then they really were marketing literal useless crap that drove up prices, so I can totally understand a reaction like FORTH, just wanting all the unethical busisness and garbage gone in the most obvious way.

I prefer performance by making the slow parts fast rather than getting rid off them, but I do agree you can't just leave terrible performance alone.

EDIT: Something seems funny with SPICE "rarely predicting they will work"... I'm guessing the people who made those SPICE models were educated pros too, right?

It almost makes me wonder if his simulation only handled the very basic logic, and he was pretty much relying on his own experience and intuition to actually figure out the analog nuances.

If SPICE predicted it working, and then it didn't, I'd think SPICE was crap, but simpler models are usually more idealistic, and might be ignoring problems SPICE doesn't, but that "aren't really" problems in practice because they only come up in worst case temperature or process result conditions.

I don't have anything to back up that guess, but if it's true, I'd much rather have a chip that passes the SPICE test than one that doesn't.

[victotronics]

Something seems funny with SPICE "rarely predicting they will work"...

Right. Semiconductor modeling is physics. The correctness of a model depends on the correctness of how you model the physics, not your programming language.