I'd say being able to replace a random part of a system from scratch is a pretty good indicator of understanding the whole system.
That said: I miss the days when a single man could understand a whole computer system. We have come a long way, since the days when a new computer came with the circuit diagram of the cpu. And it does not feel like we took the right path.
Why doesn't it feel like we took the right path? What would've been a better path? Programs are complex, they have to be. Life is complex and modeling that is hard.
Software does not have to be complex. It usually ends up that way for economical and practical reasons, i.e. incompetent people working for impatient managers. "It's hard" is not an excuse, it's a challenge.
And I think that things could be better, because I see no improvement over the last 30 or so years. More people have access to technology, and some execution times have decreased, but we are still doing the exact same things, in the exact same ways. Except for the things that we are doing worse now. Like shoving mainframe applications on clusters of PC hardware, or nesting VMs to display a hyper text page, or encrusting everything in thick layers of drm and NDAs, or using complex multi user systems to drive hand held telephones.
So what would you suggest doing differently? I'm all for reducing the complexity of software. It'd help reduce bugs and so on and so forth, but finding that way reducing complexity is difficult. Where did we go wrong? People far smarter than I have thought about this and this is the result.
5 comments
3 u/flope_de 19 Aug 2015 17:47
I'd say being able to replace a random part of a system from scratch is a pretty good indicator of understanding the whole system.
That said: I miss the days when a single man could understand a whole computer system. We have come a long way, since the days when a new computer came with the circuit diagram of the cpu. And it does not feel like we took the right path.
0 u/Sylos 19 Aug 2015 19:20
Why doesn't it feel like we took the right path? What would've been a better path? Programs are complex, they have to be. Life is complex and modeling that is hard.
2 u/flope_de 19 Aug 2015 19:40
Software does not have to be complex. It usually ends up that way for economical and practical reasons, i.e. incompetent people working for impatient managers. "It's hard" is not an excuse, it's a challenge.
And I think that things could be better, because I see no improvement over the last 30 or so years. More people have access to technology, and some execution times have decreased, but we are still doing the exact same things, in the exact same ways. Except for the things that we are doing worse now. Like shoving mainframe applications on clusters of PC hardware, or nesting VMs to display a hyper text page, or encrusting everything in thick layers of drm and NDAs, or using complex multi user systems to drive hand held telephones.
0 u/Sylos 19 Aug 2015 21:09
So what would you suggest doing differently? I'm all for reducing the complexity of software. It'd help reduce bugs and so on and so forth, but finding that way reducing complexity is difficult. Where did we go wrong? People far smarter than I have thought about this and this is the result.
2 u/flope_de 19 Aug 2015 23:28
The status quo is not the result of smart people thinking, it's the result of successful people doing.
As far as solutions go: Why bother? I'd rather leave revolutions to people younger, and even dumber than me.