
Tossing Algebraic Flowers Down the Great Divide (1997) [pdf] - haskellandchill
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/tcs97.pdf
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PaulFB
Goguen, so prolific! the ADJ group, OBJ, Maude, CafeOBJ, Clear, The Semiotic
Zoo, Sheaves, Institutions. I understand maybe 5% of this stuff. Why has
Goguen's work not sparked more research? Especially with the emphases on
Algebraic Specification and Category theory? Is Goguen still ahead of his
time?

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unsatchmo
"Computers are the only significant commodity to ever get progressively
cheaper as they get better, throughout their entire history".

It seems to me like most things get cheaper as they get better. At least
anything that benefits from improvements to a manufacturing process, economies
of scale and iterated design... which is most mass manufactured goods.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
I think it's just rare that there's ever a gap as big as there has been with
computers between the first prototype and the current consumer grade
equipment.

Ignoring for a moment the per cycle efficiency increase (which is non-trivial
and adds a couple orders of magnitude extra), a modern CPU is ~500,000 times
faster than ENIAC was, which was itself a ~1,000 times faster than other
computing solutions at the time, at a cost of $6,500,000 to $100.

So per dollar, you're getting 32 _billion_ times the computer. It's actually
more like a _trillion_ times the computer if you count in per-instruction
efficiency gains.

Yeah, we get _better_ at most things, but almost no other thing have we gotten
so much explosively better at it than computers.

You can argue clothes, screws, cars, shoes, whatever are better now than they
used to be. Maybe they are. But they're not a _billion_ times better per
dollar. I suspect that most of them strain to be a _thousand_ times better per
dollar.

~~~
Pamar
What about cars? Or planes?

~~~
biofox
One of the first consumer cars is considered to be the Benz Patent-Motorwagen
[1].

Adjusted price: $3,998

Maximum speed: 10 mph

The improvements in performance and price are not even those seen in
computers.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-
Motorwagen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen)

