Article View: comp.lang.misc
Article #4965Re: Software Technology is NOT Primitive
From: Sam
Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1987 18:57
Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1987 18:57
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Let's look at this cost issue. Hardware gets faster and cheaper by orders of magnitude. Software productivity cannot keep up; any improvements are measured in percentages, not in orders of magnitude. Therefore we hear the argument "let hardware do the job... it's not worth it to burn the money to improve the hardware for code or performance...". I consider this socially irresponsible. Rather than company XYZ paying the extra $YYY to properly structure the code, they rely on the ZZZ thousands of consumers to pay extra for disk storage, power, time, etc. to store, feed, and wait for this software. This is an order of magnitude not taken into account in rebuttals to the original observation. Do customers understand why processors with supposedly 10-30 times more power as their old machine have no more than incremental improvements in functionality and performance, yet take roughly 10 times the disk storage? (Yes, I and others *can* cite examples of this). Let's reserve the productivity / portability argument for those few of a kind cases such as custom-designed software (eg. military / government contracts), but let's not get carried away by excusing the laziness of the commercial software market. Granted there's a middle ground; it's not so slanted in favor of software sloth. -- Sam Hahn
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Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!cae780!leadsv!esl!ssh From: ssh@esl.UUCP (Sam) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.software-eng Subject: Re: Software Technology is NOT Primitive Message-ID: <516@esl.UUCP> Date: Sun, 1-Nov-87 13:57:13 EST Article-I.D.: esl.516 Posted: Sun Nov 1 13:57:13 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 5-Nov-87 20:58:15 EST References: <3405@ece-csc.UUCP> <638@its63b.ed.ac.uk> Reply-To: ssh@esl.UUCP (Sam) Distribution: comp Organization: ESL Inc. Lines: 29