
Post-scarcity Software - rplevy
http://www.jasmine.org.uk/dogfood/story/article_42.html
======
mojonixon
Painful to read. I have spent years with my head buried in code and I clearly
never understood what it was that I was doing. Go RTFA if you haven't already.
tl;dr is not an excuse.

~~~
pchristensen
how about tgb;dr (too green & black)? :)

Just kidding, I'll go read it (after I copy and paste it somewhere)

Oh, I couldn't resist: "My eyes, the goggles they do nothing!"

~~~
a-priori
Even easier: In Firefox, View -> Page Style -> No Style

~~~
pchristensen
Hot tip, thanks!

------
DabAsteroid
Excerpt:

 _We have always been store-poor. We've been mill-poor, too: our processors
have been slow, running at hundreds, then a few thousands, of cycles per
second. We haven't been able to afford the cycles to do any sophisticated
munging of our data. What we stored - in the most store intensive format we
had - was what we got, and what we delivered to our users. It was a
compromise, but a compromise forced on us by the inadequacy of our machines.
...

The compromises of poverty are built into these operating systems, into our
programming languages, into our brains as programmers; so deeply ingrained
that we've forgotten that they are compromises, we've forgotten why we chose
them. Like misers counting grains on the granary floor while outside the new
crop is falling from the stalks for want of harvesting, we sit in the middle
of great riches and behave as though we were destitute. ...

Every mistake, every compromise to poverty ingrained in Java is there in C#
for all the world to see.

It's time to stop this. Of course we're not as wealthy as Turing. Of course
our machines still do not have infinite store. But we now have so much store -
and so many processor cycles - that we should stop treating them as finite.
...

Historically, when storage was expensive we stored textual values in fields of
fixed width to economise on storage; we still do so largely because that's
what we've always done rather than because there's any longer any rational
reason to. ...

But it is no longer necessary, nor is it desirable, and good computer
languages such as LISP transparently ignores the difference between the
storage format of different numbers. ...

Interestingly, Paul Graham, in his essay 'The Hundred Year Language', suggests
doing away with stings altogether, and representing them as lists of
characters. This is powerful because strings become S-expressions and can be
handled as S-expressions; but strings are inherently one-dimensional and
S-expressions are not. So unless you have some definite collating sequence for
a branching 'string' it's meaning may be ambiguous. Nevertheless, in principle
and depending on the internal representation of a CONS cell, a list of
characters can be of indefinite extent, and, while it isn't efficient of
storage, it is efficient of allocation and deallocation; to store a list of N
characters does not require us to have a contiguous lump of N bytes available
on the heap; nor does it require us to shuffle the heap to make a contiguous
lump of that size available. ...

Welcome, then, to post scarcity computing. It may not look much like what
you're used to, but if it doesn't it's because you've grown up with scarcity,
and even since we left scarcity behind you've been living with software
designed by people who grew up with scarcity, who still hoard when there's no
need, who don't understand how to use wealth. It's a richer world, a world
without arbitrary restrictions. If it looks a lot like Alan Kay (and
friends)'s Croquet, that's because Alan Kay has been going down the right path
for a long time._

    
    
      .
    

I previously asked, "4 gigs of DRAM costs less than $100, today. Who cares if
software is bloated?" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305937>

    
    
      .
    

Julian Simon's apropos quote of Shakespeare (Sonnet 1):

[http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR3...](http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR33.txt)

 _Making a famine where abundance lies, ... And, tender churl, mak'st waste in
niggarding._

