IMHO that's just historic, mostly. EEs have been designing circuits with structural complexity at least as great as any software program, using graphical tools, all along. Early on (after the plugboard era) computers didn't have the horsepower or graphic capability to do software CAD, and so programmers got started using prose of necessity. It's quite possible that as a result, programmers have tended to be non-graphical people (viz. the folks that hate using X-windows, or all that "GUI crap".) Now getting a graphical language frontend to be as popular would require replicating a lot of existing work in the new domain - for instance a graphical function library front end that presents all of the C function library as 'chips'. And then you'd still have to either convince all those linear, text-based programmers to change, or start over with the new generation.
I believe that a new generation will in fact start over using a graphical system sometime in the near future. There are things you can see and understand in three dimensions that just don't show up in prose.
This is partly the reason why surviving languages use symbols representing sounds rather than images as the Egyptians used. It's faster to write, and possibly faster to read.
Ummm... Egyptian hieroglyphics were actually phonetic symbols. And Chinese (still i use) is pictographic and not phonetic.
This view is belied by the graphical tools used to design and layout hardware and chips. Higher level languages in particular are largely based on connecting the data flow between various pre-defined blocks or objects - function libraries.
I actually built a primitive graphical Pascal pre-processor back in the late 1980s, which used the CMU SPICE circuit board layout program. Since the output of the program was text based, it could be processed into Pascal code. The model I used was that a function was a 'black box' with input and output 'pins', but also could be designed itself in a separate file.
I never actually finished it, but it was pretty workable as a programming paradigm, and opened up some new ways of looking at programs. For instance, a 3-D structure could be used to visualize formal structure (function calls, etc.) in one axis, data flow in another.
Also, the Interface Builder for the NeXT machine was more-or-less graphical, IIRC only 2-D. It made for very fast prototyping of a new user interface, and the 'functional' code could be put in later. (I saw a former schoolteacher, who had never used a computer until a few months before, demonstrate creating a basic calculator in Interface Builder in under 15 minutes. It worked, first time.)
I think the real issue is in large part a chicken-and-egg problem. Since there are no libraries of 'components' that can be easily used, it's a lot of work to build everything yourself. And since there is no well-accepted tool, nobody builds the function libraries.
Looking at this from a higher level, a complex system diagram is a visualization that could be broken down to smaller components.
In practice, I believe that the present text-based programming paradigm artificially restricts programming to a much simpler logical structure compared to those commonly accepted and used by EEs. For example, I used to say "structured programming" is essentially restricting your flow chart to what can be drawn in two dimensions with no crossing lines. That's not strictly true, but it is close. Since the late 1970s, I've remarked that software is the only engineering discipline that still depends on prose designs.
The only reason that Argentina's economy is recovering now is because they mostly abandoned the World Bank/IMF policies that they've been following for decades.
Apparently you haven't been following the news lately.
He spent the gold reserves nationalizing the railroads and buying votes. Later the lack of those reserves resulted in the Argentine peso having the highest inflation rate in the world. If you were reading the Wikipedia article on Peron, it is apparently written by a die-hard Peronista and doesn't cover the real impact of his policies or the true reasons why he was tossed out - not once but twice. I haven't been able to track down the original citation but from what I've read, literally when he became President his first action was to be shown the gold reserves, where he said, "We will take this and spend it on the people!" - the original wording was better but hey. He did in fact spend nearly all of the reserves, and that was a key factor later in the destruction of the stable peso.
Here's just one analyst's view:
In 1930, Argentina’s gold reserves ranked 6th. After the “experts” took over the central bank, reserves fell to 9th in 1948 (with $700 million), 16th during 1950-54 (with $530 million), and 28th during 1960-1964 (with $290 million). The Argentine central bank, created in 1935, was at first a private corporation. Its president lasted longer (seven years) than the president of the country, and it had strict limits for government debt purchases and even had foreign bankers on its board. It became a government entity in 1946. When Perón assumed power shortly thereafter, he hastily expanded the role of government, relaxed central banking rules and used the bank to facilitate his statist policies. In just 10 years, the peso went from 4.05 per U.S. dollar to 18 in 1955 (and later peaked at 36 that same year). After Perón’s rule, Argentina further devalued its currency to 400 pesos per U.S. dollar by 1970.
(http://www.visionandvalues.org/2013/06/dont-cry-for-me-america-comparing-argentina-and-the-united-states/) - I don't know anything about this site, it was just a convenient Google result. But these facts are well known.
It should be said that Peron was not the first, or only, leader who made a mess of things in Argentina. The Argentine political system was already suffering from various issues including classism, huge gaps between industrialists and workers, etc., and (according to several sources) a political mind set that made and makes it difficult to maintain a working democracy. The so-called 'Infamous Decade' starting in the 1930s destroyed what was left of a traditional political system and made it possible for the fascists to take over. This is a pretty good description of the situation.
That happened here in the US for a number of home loans - their loans had been shuffled so many times between institutions that some borrowers successfully argued in foreclosure proceedings that there was no evidence that the foreclosing party actually owned the loan.
In the last 120 years, Argentina has singlehandedly destroyed their own economy a total of three separate times. In 1910 Argentina was a 'first world' state, IIRC the fifth largest in the world. Then Peron got elected, and almost his first act was to pull all of the gold out of their national bank and spend it.
I should have said NATO round, but it's still apparently a legend, as you say. Thanks! Here's more discussion for those interested. And another.
There are some differences between the rounds, and it can cause problems, but it's not as significant as I believed, and it's not about the diameter per se. Or so it appears!:)
From the very first days of Tor I've assumed that at least one, and probably several different agents (legal and illegal, gov't and private) would be smart or at least interested enough to run a significant percentage of Tor hosts. This is akin to Willie Sutton's reasoning for why he robbed banks - "That's where the money is." Since Tor is of most interest to folks who want to keep things private, that's where people who want to know private things are sure to lurk. In the case of NSA, it's worth doing just in case they can _someday_ decrypt data going through. This would work best when some significant percentage of hosts is 'owned', which would allow those hosts to cooperate in determining the true path for some fraction of the data going through.
For a made-up example, assuming 1/3 of all Tor hosts are compromised in one way or another and preserve or report the data, the incoming and outgoing routes to the agent. If those hosts are optimally situated worldwide, they will on some occasions (often?) comprise a sufficiently large portion of the onion route between two 'bad actors', so that various techniques such as timing comparisons will assist in filling in the blanks and some, if not all, of the useful information will be exposed.
Then there are the possibilities of deeper hacks into apparently legitimate Tor hosts, which NSA is known to be capable of.
I'm just speculating, but if I, a relatively security-naive person can come up with these thoughts, I'm sure that folks who specialize in this could come up with better ones.
Technically she was not a diplomat, but a consular assistant. Consular people do not have diplomatic immunity. They are here essentially on a business visa.
I don't recall/haven't followed the specifics of the case but if the accusations are correct she was in violation of laws against human trafficking and near-slavery.
Excellent point. Some years back I learned that the total cost of the then in-development F-18 was over 50% software. There were IIRC several hundred (thousand?) VME circuit boards in the machine.
Yes, IIRC (probably from Wikipedia) that the Air Force insisted on using the Sparrow despite strong encouragement to use the Navy's Sidewinder, which was already well established as effective. But NIH predominated. The AF finally did accept the Sidewinder, but I think that was much later. I think the Sidewinder is still in use, on its 9th design iteration.
But from what I've read, missiles alone would still not have been a good idea in Viet Nam. Sometimes getting up close and throwing lead 'rocks' is still necessary. For example, what if all your missiles are gone? If the opponent _knows_ you don't have guns, they know you're a sitting duck. If they don't know, they have to be a little more careful, leaving you a way to either continue fighting or scoot on out of there.
Yes. I've basically argued that C should not be used for application programming in general - device drivers, kernels, maybe some other high performance OS tasks, and the occasional small high performance functions in larger programs.
I can further argue that the extent to which even those domains need to be in a low-level language like C at present is really a testament to the limitations of compilers - IMHO it is high time to apply AI and machine learning techniques to compiler design and code translation. Watson could do some interesting things with language processing and a good knowledge base. In some cases the top-level symbolic program design could go right to custom silicon.
It's significant that the 'infamous' APL, a very highly abstracted mostly-functional interpreted language that looks at everything pretty much as arrays, was often as faster at doing things like matrix inversions faster than most compiled implementations in other languages. This is because the interpreter did almost no work, and the underlying code for a given function could be tuned to the very restricted domain that it was operating in, in the assembly language. I believe there was even a microcoded APL interpreter, which would basically make an APL virtual machine.
Long ago I worked in a Pascal dialect (for the Perq workstation) that included several systems programming extensions. One was that ability to grab a block of memory as raw data, then work within that block to create and manipulate named variables as usual with full protection by the compiler. I don't recall the other extensions.
I still think that for the vast majority of the code in most applications, the performance impact of runtime checking is minimal. So it's feasible to isolate the very few components where this is not the case, squeeze them down to the absolute minimum size and complexity, so that those pieces can be thoroughly vetted and maybe even 'proved'.
Running in 'strict' mode is something I do during the entire dev and test cycle, then *usually* turn down for release - sometimes it has been beneficial to run internal-use programs (cron jobs) in mostly-strict, verbose logging mode to assist in debugging two years later when nobody knows how it works any more.
I'm thinking that a smart compiler or maybe a runtime profiler might be able to figure out where runtime bounds checks are appropriate and where they are not, to a great extent. So maybe the default would be checks, with an option to turn off for particular variables (at run time).
A related question comes from the principal of web programming, "Be strict with output, lenient with input" - a web browser should be as correct as possible with everything it puts out, and try to figure out what it receives to do something sensible with it. I'm not sure this is still considered the 'right way', as it tended to encourage (or at least not discourage) a lot of bad things.
Also automated systems will find _different_ types of bugs than humans. Just like computer chess players use different strategies than human players. I anticipate that the next step will be automated systems for learning new automated bug-finding methods that humans may never have considered.
Is this still true? IANA windows person, but I was under the impression that the newer versions of the OS had more and better compartmentalism and enforcement of user space.
Having never been a significant C coder (I skipped that phase), I'll argue that by my observation the vast majority of problems would be eliminated if C programs were incapable of buffer overflows. This is less simple than it seems. It would require not only some language features, but library changes, and would slow things down (imperceptibly?).
There is no reason an application developer should ever encounter a segfault in a modern language. Many of today's languages are essentially immune to this problem, except when there is an error... wait for it... in the underlying C implementation of the compiler or runtime environment!:D
Actually it was shown back in the late 1970s that it is essentially impossible for 'black box' testing to discover more than about 30% of the bugs in a sufficiently large code base. It's based on the NP-complete problem of following all possible variations of the branches using all possible combinations of input, both valid and invalid. It's fairly easy to build a one page program that can not effectively be completely tested. It was also shown that, given good programming practice, roughly 70% of the bugs are built into the design (before a line of code has been written). Then, finally, a significant number/percentage of bugs are of the sort where it's a judgement call whether it's a bug or a feature.
Source: I used to run a Software Quality Assurance Workshop for my then-company, and did the research. A few programming practices have changed, and the repertoire of automated tools has greatly increased in both quantity and sophistication, but average program size and the list of asynchronous externalities has ballooned by two or three orders of magnitude, so there we are.
The day that robots can replace all of our jobs is quite simply the day that we no longer need to work to begin with. If that truly happened, you wouldn't really have a need for an economy - be it a free one or a command one.
That presents an interesting question. I can argue that there will still be an economy, and even a (smaller) labor force. There has to be a balancing system - a way to feed back the cost of the resources (materials, energy, information, time, and not least space) to provide goods against the 'value' of the goods. For example, there just isn't enough land on the planet to provide a 1000 acre estate with a huge automated mansion to everyone. As for labor, there will be many people who want to create things - it is in our nature as artists, engineers, and so forth. Hunter-gatherers made art, not because they got paid but because they wanted to. In this future perhaps they just do it, and give it to each other. That might become like a Potlatch culture where people competed to give away as much as they could.
One problem is likely to be how people without the creative bent, without the capability to do anything 'interesting' will adapt to this new world. Or people whose only real skill and interest is beating other people up and/or making babies. I think there will still be an underclass, including many people with severe behavior issues, run-ins with police (they'll still be around, because thieves and sociopaths will still be around). There will be people who delight in beating up on robots, and those who enjoy gaming the system just to accrue power over others.
I think the quote from Jesus, "The poor you will always have with you." is a very astute observation. We basically define 'poor' within any society using a relative measure. So the 'poor' in such a wealthy society will still be there, but they'l l have more creatures comforts, safety, health, etc. than we can imagine, just as today's first world poor are wealthier by most measures than the kings of yore.
Long ago - 40 years give or take - I pondered a similar question and came up with a great idea. As I put it then, "The promise of the Industrial Revolution was that the machines would do all the work and we would all live like kings. That is coming to fruition today. The flip side of this is that there are few jobs. So I propose a new political party, the 'Technical Party', which advocates a fundamental change in the political climate: Make unemployment no longer the problem, but the goal! Work on changing the system so that nobody has to work. Perhaps for some years there will be a 'draft' like the old military draft, where everyone has to work at something (not necessarily paid - community service or whatnot) for a few years, then they would retire and do whatever is interesting. Just as in the military, some small percentage of people will desire to stay in and have a 'career' in work. But the majority will leave after a few years."
Interesting point about Marx BTW - I did some analysis of Marxism a longer time ago, and was able to demonstrate that his ideas made no sense and did not fit the real world at all. What we are discussing here is what you might call the "socialism of the rich", which is also what the Star Trek economy was. When one is rich, it is easy to give anything one owns, within limits, to anybody.
Finally (this is long, sorry!) I'm now working on a program to finance private space development. It has been advocated that space development will, over the next 50 to 100 years, result in a 10-fold increase in the standard of living of everyone on the planet. I would not be surprised by that number, though I am unlikely to see much of that. But robotics is so essential to success in space that the two aspects will be impossible to separate. The carpenter's robotic assistant will likely be a technological descendant of a robotic assistant developed for lunar exploration or asteroid mining, or space vehicle maintenance.
Most models show that a flat tax would result in the wealthiest (1%) paying more than they do now, who can afford the more exotic tax shelter methods. The flat tax would help the middle class the most. Note that at present, the top 5% of taxpayers in the US pay 58% of the taxes - a higher percentage than in the 'high tax' days of the 1960s with the notional 90% rate (that apparently noboby ever actually had to pay). The top 50% of taxpayers pay 97.75% of taxes, and the bottom 50% pay 2.25% of the taxes. Actually the bottom 50% receive about 9% more than they pay but that doesn't show up in the tax tables as the Earned Income Credit and other items show up under government expenditures, not taxes. See Who Pays Income Taxes and How Much?.
But let's go farther on this topic. If the wealthiest 5% should pay the most, should that be restricted to the US? Fair is fair, and nowadays it's all about how the US should reject "exceptionalism". Maybe the top 5% of the world should pay the most. Well, the poverty line in 2013 for a family of four was $23,550 (excluding AK and HI). And that pay scale puts those people in the top 5% globally. So by this measure, essentially everyone in the US should pay the highest rate, at present 39.6% of AGI. Are you ready to give 40% of your income to the government?
This is completely untrue and a tiresome argument from people who *have* wealth. The poor were far more wealthy in the 60s than now. The cost of living is exponentially higher today. We are entering an era of serfdom.
Actually, not true even in the US. There are arguments about where their money is coming from, but they're doing quite well. The biggest problem in the US and other first world countries is the inevitable lagging while the rest of the world starts to catch up. Stats show that worldwide, the mean standard of living, the percentage and actual number of extreme poor, and health are all at historic highs and have been improving at unprecedented rates since the 1980s. The only exceptions are almost entirely among certain islamic nations, which have in some cases actually got poorer and sicker.
What first worlders need to realize is that eventually, inevitably, their pay scales (adjusted for productivity) will be on par with those in many former third world nations. As that progress continues, pay will continue to stagnate in the first world. More worriedly, advances in robotics appear to be on track to eliminate 50% of the jobs that people have at present, and there is no evidence that those jobs will be replaced by as many new ones.
I recently saw video of an entire electric motor that was 3D printed. With that and some other bits like improved recycling of complex machines like appliances, it may actually be better in the long run. Maybe there's no need for the 10 year machine, if the amortized cost is greater than a chain of 1 year machines, that get recycled into new ones down the street.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a reason why circuits are not designed anymore by drawing circuits (in most cases anyway)
AFAIK they're certainly not designed in prose. What about all those VLSI and layout CAD systems?
IMHO that's just historic, mostly. EEs have been designing circuits with structural complexity at least as great as any software program, using graphical tools, all along. Early on (after the plugboard era) computers didn't have the horsepower or graphic capability to do software CAD, and so programmers got started using prose of necessity. It's quite possible that as a result, programmers have tended to be non-graphical people (viz. the folks that hate using X-windows, or all that "GUI crap".) Now getting a graphical language frontend to be as popular would require replicating a lot of existing work in the new domain - for instance a graphical function library front end that presents all of the C function library as 'chips'. And then you'd still have to either convince all those linear, text-based programmers to change, or start over with the new generation.
I believe that a new generation will in fact start over using a graphical system sometime in the near future. There are things you can see and understand in three dimensions that just don't show up in prose.
This is partly the reason why surviving languages use symbols representing sounds rather than images as the Egyptians used. It's faster to write, and possibly faster to read.
Ummm ... Egyptian hieroglyphics were actually phonetic symbols. And Chinese (still i use) is pictographic and not phonetic.
This view is belied by the graphical tools used to design and layout hardware and chips. Higher level languages in particular are largely based on connecting the data flow between various pre-defined blocks or objects - function libraries.
I actually built a primitive graphical Pascal pre-processor back in the late 1980s, which used the CMU SPICE circuit board layout program. Since the output of the program was text based, it could be processed into Pascal code. The model I used was that a function was a 'black box' with input and output 'pins', but also could be designed itself in a separate file.
I never actually finished it, but it was pretty workable as a programming paradigm, and opened up some new ways of looking at programs. For instance, a 3-D structure could be used to visualize formal structure (function calls, etc.) in one axis, data flow in another.
Also, the Interface Builder for the NeXT machine was more-or-less graphical, IIRC only 2-D. It made for very fast prototyping of a new user interface, and the 'functional' code could be put in later. (I saw a former schoolteacher, who had never used a computer until a few months before, demonstrate creating a basic calculator in Interface Builder in under 15 minutes. It worked, first time.)
I think the real issue is in large part a chicken-and-egg problem. Since there are no libraries of 'components' that can be easily used, it's a lot of work to build everything yourself. And since there is no well-accepted tool, nobody builds the function libraries.
Looking at this from a higher level, a complex system diagram is a visualization that could be broken down to smaller components.
In practice, I believe that the present text-based programming paradigm artificially restricts programming to a much simpler logical structure compared to those commonly accepted and used by EEs. For example, I used to say "structured programming" is essentially restricting your flow chart to what can be drawn in two dimensions with no crossing lines. That's not strictly true, but it is close. Since the late 1970s, I've remarked that software is the only engineering discipline that still depends on prose designs.
The only reason that Argentina's economy is recovering now is because they mostly abandoned the World Bank/IMF policies that they've been following for decades.
Apparently you haven't been following the news lately.
He spent the gold reserves nationalizing the railroads and buying votes. Later the lack of those reserves resulted in the Argentine peso having the highest inflation rate in the world. If you were reading the Wikipedia article on Peron, it is apparently written by a die-hard Peronista and doesn't cover the real impact of his policies or the true reasons why he was tossed out - not once but twice. I haven't been able to track down the original citation but from what I've read, literally when he became President his first action was to be shown the gold reserves, where he said, "We will take this and spend it on the people!" - the original wording was better but hey. He did in fact spend nearly all of the reserves, and that was a key factor later in the destruction of the stable peso.
Here's just one analyst's view:
In 1930, Argentina’s gold reserves ranked 6th. After the “experts” took over the central bank, reserves fell to 9th in 1948 (with $700 million), 16th during 1950-54 (with $530 million), and 28th during 1960-1964 (with $290 million).
The Argentine central bank, created in 1935, was at first a private corporation. Its president lasted longer (seven years) than the president of the country, and it had strict limits for government debt purchases and even had foreign bankers on its board. It became a government entity in 1946.
When Perón assumed power shortly thereafter, he hastily expanded the role of government, relaxed central banking rules and used the bank to facilitate his statist policies. In just 10 years, the peso went from 4.05 per U.S. dollar to 18 in 1955 (and later peaked at 36 that same year). After Perón’s rule, Argentina further devalued its currency to 400 pesos per U.S. dollar by 1970.
(http://www.visionandvalues.org/2013/06/dont-cry-for-me-america-comparing-argentina-and-the-united-states/) - I don't know anything about this site, it was just a convenient Google result. But these facts are well known.
It should be said that Peron was not the first, or only, leader who made a mess of things in Argentina. The Argentine political system was already suffering from various issues including classism, huge gaps between industrialists and workers, etc., and (according to several sources) a political mind set that made and makes it difficult to maintain a working democracy. The so-called 'Infamous Decade' starting in the 1930s destroyed what was left of a traditional political system and made it possible for the fascists to take over. This is a pretty good description of the situation.
That happened here in the US for a number of home loans - their loans had been shuffled so many times between institutions that some borrowers successfully argued in foreclosure proceedings that there was no evidence that the foreclosing party actually owned the loan.
In the last 120 years, Argentina has singlehandedly destroyed their own economy a total of three separate times. In 1910 Argentina was a 'first world' state, IIRC the fifth largest in the world. Then Peron got elected, and almost his first act was to pull all of the gold out of their national bank and spend it.
I should have said NATO round, but it's still apparently a legend, as you say. Thanks!
Here's more discussion for those interested. And another.
There are some differences between the rounds, and it can cause problems, but it's not as significant as I believed, and it's not about the diameter per se. Or so it appears! :)
From the very first days of Tor I've assumed that at least one, and probably several different agents (legal and illegal, gov't and private) would be smart or at least interested enough to run a significant percentage of Tor hosts. This is akin to Willie Sutton's reasoning for why he robbed banks - "That's where the money is." Since Tor is of most interest to folks who want to keep things private, that's where people who want to know private things are sure to lurk. In the case of NSA, it's worth doing just in case they can _someday_ decrypt data going through. This would work best when some significant percentage of hosts is 'owned', which would allow those hosts to cooperate in determining the true path for some fraction of the data going through.
For a made-up example, assuming 1/3 of all Tor hosts are compromised in one way or another and preserve or report the data, the incoming and outgoing routes to the agent. If those hosts are optimally situated worldwide, they will on some occasions (often?) comprise a sufficiently large portion of the onion route between two 'bad actors', so that various techniques such as timing comparisons will assist in filling in the blanks and some, if not all, of the useful information will be exposed.
Then there are the possibilities of deeper hacks into apparently legitimate Tor hosts, which NSA is known to be capable of.
I'm just speculating, but if I, a relatively security-naive person can come up with these thoughts, I'm sure that folks who specialize in this could come up with better ones.
Technically she was not a diplomat, but a consular assistant. Consular people do not have diplomatic immunity. They are here essentially on a business visa.
I don't recall/haven't followed the specifics of the case but if the accusations are correct she was in violation of laws against human trafficking and near-slavery.
IIRC I think it's the US (AR-15? I forget) is chambered so AK-47 can't use the rounds but the US gun can use AK-47 rounds.
Software is hard.
Excellent point. Some years back I learned that the total cost of the then in-development F-18 was over 50% software. There were IIRC several hundred (thousand?) VME circuit boards in the machine.
What carried more stuff and has a longer loiter time, a stealth fighter or a smoking hole in the ground?
Well, technically the hole in the ground can carry more stuff, and will loiter there for a long, long time. ;)
Yes, IIRC (probably from Wikipedia) that the Air Force insisted on using the Sparrow despite strong encouragement to use the Navy's Sidewinder, which was already well established as effective. But NIH predominated. The AF finally did accept the Sidewinder, but I think that was much later. I think the Sidewinder is still in use, on its 9th design iteration.
But from what I've read, missiles alone would still not have been a good idea in Viet Nam. Sometimes getting up close and throwing lead 'rocks' is still necessary. For example, what if all your missiles are gone? If the opponent _knows_ you don't have guns, they know you're a sitting duck. If they don't know, they have to be a little more careful, leaving you a way to either continue fighting or scoot on out of there.
Yes. I've basically argued that C should not be used for application programming in general - device drivers, kernels, maybe some other high performance OS tasks, and the occasional small high performance functions in larger programs.
I can further argue that the extent to which even those domains need to be in a low-level language like C at present is really a testament to the limitations of compilers - IMHO it is high time to apply AI and machine learning techniques to compiler design and code translation. Watson could do some interesting things with language processing and a good knowledge base. In some cases the top-level symbolic program design could go right to custom silicon.
It's significant that the 'infamous' APL, a very highly abstracted mostly-functional interpreted language that looks at everything pretty much as arrays, was often as faster at doing things like matrix inversions faster than most compiled implementations in other languages. This is because the interpreter did almost no work, and the underlying code for a given function could be tuned to the very restricted domain that it was operating in, in the assembly language. I believe there was even a microcoded APL interpreter, which would basically make an APL virtual machine.
Long ago I worked in a Pascal dialect (for the Perq workstation) that included several systems programming extensions. One was that ability to grab a block of memory as raw data, then work within that block to create and manipulate named variables as usual with full protection by the compiler. I don't recall the other extensions.
I still think that for the vast majority of the code in most applications, the performance impact of runtime checking is minimal. So it's feasible to isolate the very few components where this is not the case, squeeze them down to the absolute minimum size and complexity, so that those pieces can be thoroughly vetted and maybe even 'proved'.
Running in 'strict' mode is something I do during the entire dev and test cycle, then *usually* turn down for release - sometimes it has been beneficial to run internal-use programs (cron jobs) in mostly-strict, verbose logging mode to assist in debugging two years later when nobody knows how it works any more.
I'm thinking that a smart compiler or maybe a runtime profiler might be able to figure out where runtime bounds checks are appropriate and where they are not, to a great extent. So maybe the default would be checks, with an option to turn off for particular variables (at run time).
A related question comes from the principal of web programming, "Be strict with output, lenient with input" - a web browser should be as correct as possible with everything it puts out, and try to figure out what it receives to do something sensible with it. I'm not sure this is still considered the 'right way', as it tended to encourage (or at least not discourage) a lot of bad things.
Also automated systems will find _different_ types of bugs than humans. Just like computer chess players use different strategies than human players. I anticipate that the next step will be automated systems for learning new automated bug-finding methods that humans may never have considered.
Is this still true? IANA windows person, but I was under the impression that the newer versions of the OS had more and better compartmentalism and enforcement of user space.
Having never been a significant C coder (I skipped that phase), I'll argue that by my observation the vast majority of problems would be eliminated if C programs were incapable of buffer overflows. This is less simple than it seems. It would require not only some language features, but library changes, and would slow things down (imperceptibly?).
There is no reason an application developer should ever encounter a segfault in a modern language. Many of today's languages are essentially immune to this problem, except when there is an error ... wait for it ... in the underlying C implementation of the compiler or runtime environment! :D
Actually it was shown back in the late 1970s that it is essentially impossible for 'black box' testing to discover more than about 30% of the bugs in a sufficiently large code base. It's based on the NP-complete problem of following all possible variations of the branches using all possible combinations of input, both valid and invalid. It's fairly easy to build a one page program that can not effectively be completely tested. It was also shown that, given good programming practice, roughly 70% of the bugs are built into the design (before a line of code has been written). Then, finally, a significant number/percentage of bugs are of the sort where it's a judgement call whether it's a bug or a feature.
Source: I used to run a Software Quality Assurance Workshop for my then-company, and did the research. A few programming practices have changed, and the repertoire of automated tools has greatly increased in both quantity and sophistication, but average program size and the list of asynchronous externalities has ballooned by two or three orders of magnitude, so there we are.
The day that robots can replace all of our jobs is quite simply the day that we no longer need to work to begin with. If that truly happened, you wouldn't really have a need for an economy - be it a free one or a command one.
That presents an interesting question. I can argue that there will still be an economy, and even a (smaller) labor force. There has to be a balancing system - a way to feed back the cost of the resources (materials, energy, information, time, and not least space) to provide goods against the 'value' of the goods. For example, there just isn't enough land on the planet to provide a 1000 acre estate with a huge automated mansion to everyone. As for labor, there will be many people who want to create things - it is in our nature as artists, engineers, and so forth. Hunter-gatherers made art, not because they got paid but because they wanted to. In this future perhaps they just do it, and give it to each other. That might become like a Potlatch culture where people competed to give away as much as they could.
One problem is likely to be how people without the creative bent, without the capability to do anything 'interesting' will adapt to this new world. Or people whose only real skill and interest is beating other people up and/or making babies. I think there will still be an underclass, including many people with severe behavior issues, run-ins with police (they'll still be around, because thieves and sociopaths will still be around). There will be people who delight in beating up on robots, and those who enjoy gaming the system just to accrue power over others.
I think the quote from Jesus, "The poor you will always have with you." is a very astute observation. We basically define 'poor' within any society using a relative measure. So the 'poor' in such a wealthy society will still be there, but they'l l have more creatures comforts, safety, health, etc. than we can imagine, just as today's first world poor are wealthier by most measures than the kings of yore.
Long ago - 40 years give or take - I pondered a similar question and came up with a great idea. As I put it then, "The promise of the Industrial Revolution was that the machines would do all the work and we would all live like kings. That is coming to fruition today. The flip side of this is that there are few jobs. So I propose a new political party, the 'Technical Party', which advocates a fundamental change in the political climate: Make unemployment no longer the problem, but the goal! Work on changing the system so that nobody has to work. Perhaps for some years there will be a 'draft' like the old military draft, where everyone has to work at something (not necessarily paid - community service or whatnot) for a few years, then they would retire and do whatever is interesting. Just as in the military, some small percentage of people will desire to stay in and have a 'career' in work. But the majority will leave after a few years."
Interesting point about Marx BTW - I did some analysis of Marxism a longer time ago, and was able to demonstrate that his ideas made no sense and did not fit the real world at all. What we are discussing here is what you might call the "socialism of the rich", which is also what the Star Trek economy was. When one is rich, it is easy to give anything one owns, within limits, to anybody.
Finally (this is long, sorry!) I'm now working on a program to finance private space development. It has been advocated that space development will, over the next 50 to 100 years, result in a 10-fold increase in the standard of living of everyone on the planet. I would not be surprised by that number, though I am unlikely to see much of that. But robotics is so essential to success in space that the two aspects will be impossible to separate. The carpenter's robotic assistant will likely be a technological descendant of a robotic assistant developed for lunar exploration or asteroid mining, or space vehicle maintenance.
Most models show that a flat tax would result in the wealthiest (1%) paying more than they do now, who can afford the more exotic tax shelter methods. The flat tax would help the middle class the most. Note that at present, the top 5% of taxpayers in the US pay 58% of the taxes - a higher percentage than in the 'high tax' days of the 1960s with the notional 90% rate (that apparently noboby ever actually had to pay). The top 50% of taxpayers pay 97.75% of taxes, and the bottom 50% pay 2.25% of the taxes. Actually the bottom 50% receive about 9% more than they pay but that doesn't show up in the tax tables as the Earned Income Credit and other items show up under government expenditures, not taxes. See Who Pays Income Taxes and How Much?.
But let's go farther on this topic. If the wealthiest 5% should pay the most, should that be restricted to the US? Fair is fair, and nowadays it's all about how the US should reject "exceptionalism". Maybe the top 5% of the world should pay the most. Well, the poverty line in 2013 for a family of four was $23,550 (excluding AK and HI). And that pay scale puts those people in the top 5% globally. So by this measure, essentially everyone in the US should pay the highest rate, at present 39.6% of AGI. Are you ready to give 40% of your income to the government?
This is completely untrue and a tiresome argument from people who *have* wealth. The poor were far more wealthy in the 60s than now. The cost of living is exponentially higher today. We are entering an era of serfdom.
Actually, not true even in the US. There are arguments about where their money is coming from, but they're doing quite well. The biggest problem in the US and other first world countries is the inevitable lagging while the rest of the world starts to catch up. Stats show that worldwide, the mean standard of living, the percentage and actual number of extreme poor, and health are all at historic highs and have been improving at unprecedented rates since the 1980s. The only exceptions are almost entirely among certain islamic nations, which have in some cases actually got poorer and sicker.
What first worlders need to realize is that eventually, inevitably, their pay scales (adjusted for productivity) will be on par with those in many former third world nations. As that progress continues, pay will continue to stagnate in the first world. More worriedly, advances in robotics appear to be on track to eliminate 50% of the jobs that people have at present, and there is no evidence that those jobs will be replaced by as many new ones.
I recently saw video of an entire electric motor that was 3D printed. With that and some other bits like improved recycling of complex machines like appliances, it may actually be better in the long run. Maybe there's no need for the 10 year machine, if the amortized cost is greater than a chain of 1 year machines, that get recycled into new ones down the street.