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In article <ggk.658820424@tirith.UUCP> ggk@tirith.UUCP (Gregory Kritsch) writes:
   cedman@golem.ps.uci.edu (Carl Edman) writes:
   >In article <ggk.658699652@tirith.UUCP> ggk@tirith.UUCP (Gregory Kritsch) writes:

   >   cedman@golem.ps.uci.edu (Carl Edman) writes:
   >   >In article <90318.162021DXB132@psuvm.psu.edu> DXB132@psuvm.psu.edu writes:

   >   So, whats your point?  It probably took 2 minutes to do the cr-lf
   >   program, and 5 for the clock.  And if they don't work, it'll take
   >   another 2 minutes to find out why not.

   >What I am complaining about ?
   >[raving-prophet-of-the-doom-of-computerdom-and-the-decadence-of-
   > -the-young-programmers-mode on ]

   Nice attitude.  Unfortunately, I'm 18 years old, and just got a little
   offended...  I hate being stereotyped.

3 reasons for you not to be offended:

        1. If you don't fit into the class of programmers I've described:
        Fine. I'm happy about every good programmer.

        2. This mode-message (like all the mode messages that people use),
        is at least semi-ironic (and that mostly self-irony)

        3. I'm only 20 years myself (altough I've been programming
        real computers for more than a decade)

   >But what happens ? Do new, imaginative mind-blowing programs appear at
   >every turn ?

   If you look hard enough, you'll notice some mind-blowing stuff out
   there.  I remember two years ago talking to someone about DTP, and
   watching their sudden realization that DTP didn't exist when they bought
   their A2000.

   Imagine what the ms-dos dudes are thinking at this moment of multi-media
   (Amigatroids have had it for a while, so we're less excited).

   Remember a program called Hypercard from Apple a few years ago?  Forget
   that, remember the idea of a window even more years ago?

   I know, a few small examples, but still, it is happening.  Computers
   today are used for a lot of things that were unimagined when I got into
   computers (er, I guess it all began 7 years ago with a TRS-80 CoCo). 
   You expect something that will boggle your mind, whereas almost every
   software developer out there is trying to make their software as simple
   and unintimidating to use as possible.

I've not denied that there is still some good and imaginative
programming going on somewhere. Most of the examples you gave were
good signs of this. What I said is that almost all software which is
written today for e.g. workstations is not better than the software
written 5 years ago. It only uses an order of magnitude more memory,
diskspace, and cpu power.

   Think sometime about the complexity of a file requester, compared to the
   list of files you get under WP on ms-dos.

MS-DOS ? Only at gun-point. WP ? Not even then.

A file requester is a fine thing. Writing a 150 KByte filerequester in
Smalltalk (only to continue to bash this language ... :-) with digitized
graphics and sound and linking it into every 20-C-lines-utility is not.
File requester belong in shared libraries (as ARP does to return to the
original topic)

   >44 kHz and 1024x640 graphics in 16 Mcolors.  Of course,not drawn
   >graphics or composed sounds. No, digitized sounds and graphics. Maybe
   >with a few hours of programming you could write a program which
   >generates the same sounds in a few kBytes. But , who cares ? Put it in
   >the digitizer and generate a Mbyte sample, it is so much easier.

   I dunno, I always imagined that theres a neato half way point.  Ie to do
   sound, you digitize instruments and then have code to vary the volume,
   pitch, and so on.  Of course, it gets stupidly complicated when you try
   for more than four voices.

There are many points against digitizing graphics and sounds for programms.
One of the most important (apart from space considerations), is that 1 Mbyte
of digitized graphics is just so much dead information. You can look
at it, but nothing more. You can't even scale it nicely. Such kind of
information does simply not take advantage of the interactive nature of
computers. Digitized information can be accessed just as well from a book.
1 Mbyte of postscript language description of graphics or 1 Mbyte of scores
in SMUS format is something entirely different. You can interact, manipulate
it on a level of abstraction which humans usualy occupy, and a program can
do things to this data, which are far more interesting. In addition to that
it is about 10-100000 times more information.

   >I am using large machines with lots of memory today, too. But I learned
   >to program on a computer with 1 kByte of memory and if you used more
   >than half of it, the screen was turned of as the screen memory was used
   >for the program. Maybe that shows. I hope it does.

   I learned on a machine with 16 kb, which was later upgraded to 32 kb.  I
   couldn't believe all the neat things I could do with 32 kb.  Now, I have
   512 kb, and I'm looking to upgrade because I don't have enough memory?

   Programs have become larger.  Fundamental reason #1: the machine op code
   doubled in size a few years ago (from 8 bits to 16).  Reason #2: The
   user has given up on cryptic commands.  Reason #3: The programmer
   started to realize there was an actual user, not just the program.

1# doesn't really hold water. While the op code sizes have indeed increased,
so has the power of the op-codes. Maybe a 6502 op-code is 8-bit and a 680x0
op-code is 16-bit long, but how many 6502 instructions do you need to do
a single 32-bit multiplication ?

#2: Cryptic commands ? That is the way people who don't understand something
try to blame it on the subject. Real programmers don't care if a command
is "cryptic". Anyway I don't see how that significantly affects your
code size.

#3: What do you mean by this ? That some programmers have given up hope
that their users can find the 'return'-key, without a little map
on the screen describing it's location ?

   I hope this isn't too philosophical for this newsgroup...

I've adjusted the followup line.

        Carl Edman


Theorectical Physicist,N.:A physicist whose  | Send mail
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