Bad syntax has nothing to do with language power. It's a cruft problem, coming from adding stuff to a language. Remember, C started out without real types; adding user-defined typenames (typedef) to the syntax broke the ability to parse modules without seeing all the type definitions. C++ made it even worse. The Pascal/Modula/Ada family of languages, on the other hand, don't have this problem. var foo: typebar; is parseable without knowing anything about typebar, while the C/C++ equivalent, typebar foo; is not.
This is all primitive to the extreme. Computer programming should involve no syntax, grammar or any such thing. It should all be objects, connectors, sensors, effectors and signals. When is everybody going to wake up and realize that the algorithm should not be the basis of programming? This is the real problem with software engineering. A software application should be viewed as a set of communicating objects.
...is that they are languages. When is the computer science folk going to realize that the algorithm should never have been the basis of computer programming? That is the root cause of the software reliability and productivity crisis. Wake up!
Sci-Fi has been predicting this stuff for decades
on
The Unblinking Eye
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· Score: 1
Sci-Fi authors like Philip Jose Farmer (see Dayworld Breakup) have been predicitng the arrival of massive public surveillance for decades. Trouble is, people like it.
MOBE2001
Frederick P. Brooks once wrote a famous essay in which he claims that there is no silver bullet that can solve the software reliability crisis. It is interesting to note that the reliability of the human brain increases with complexity whereas that of computer programs grows proportionately with complexity. Why is that? Is there something that the brain does that we can duplicate in our software?
I suggest that Brooks may have done the software engineering field a disservice. There is indeed a silver bullet out there and the brain is proof. I propose that the US goverment and the software industry enact the equivalent of the Marshall Plan to find this silver bullet before the crisis turns into disaster.
MOBE 2001
...it takes way too long to develop and it is prone to bugs. This is such a big problem that, just a couple of days ago, NASA and Carnegie Mellon University announced a consortium to find a solution to the problem, even though pundits like Frederick Brooks and Jeff Voas assure us that there is no silver bullet.
IMO, the problem has nothing to do with designers or programmers. It has to do with the linguistic tools that we use to build software. We use languages to create sequential algorithms. The problem with algorithms is that their sequential nature makes it hard to predict the timing of events. It is the unforseen event that causes the nasty crashes.
Software will not come of age until we realize that computer science is really a subset of communication science. It can all be done with sensors and effectors and other objects sending signals and messages to each other. In hardware it's easy to to time events because of the parallelism. This is why hardware is so reliable: events arrive at their proper time. Not so with software. We need to emulate this parallelism in our software. We need to think in terms of *signals* and parallel objects.
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Bad syntax has nothing to do with language power. It's a cruft problem, coming from adding stuff to a language. Remember, C started out without real types; adding user-defined typenames (typedef) to the syntax broke the ability to parse modules without seeing all the type definitions. C++ made it even worse. The Pascal/Modula/Ada family of languages, on the other hand, don't have this problem. var foo: typebar; is parseable without knowing anything about typebar, while the C/C++ equivalent, typebar foo; is not.
This is all primitive to the extreme. Computer programming should involve no syntax, grammar or any such thing. It should all be objects, connectors, sensors, effectors and signals. When is everybody going to wake up and realize that the algorithm should not be the basis of programming? This is the real problem with software engineering. A software application should be viewed as a set of communicating objects.
...is that they are languages. When is the computer science folk going to realize that the algorithm should never have been the basis of computer programming? That is the root cause of the software reliability and productivity crisis. Wake up!
Sci-Fi authors like Philip Jose Farmer (see Dayworld Breakup) have been predicitng the arrival of massive public surveillance for decades. Trouble is, people like it. MOBE2001
Frederick P. Brooks once wrote a famous essay in which he claims that there is no silver bullet that can solve the software reliability crisis. It is interesting to note that the reliability of the human brain increases with complexity whereas that of computer programs grows proportionately with complexity. Why is that? Is there something that the brain does that we can duplicate in our software? I suggest that Brooks may have done the software engineering field a disservice. There is indeed a silver bullet out there and the brain is proof. I propose that the US goverment and the software industry enact the equivalent of the Marshall Plan to find this silver bullet before the crisis turns into disaster. MOBE 2001
...it takes way too long to develop and it is prone to bugs. This is such a big problem that, just a couple of days ago, NASA and Carnegie Mellon University announced a consortium to find a solution to the problem, even though pundits like Frederick Brooks and Jeff Voas assure us that there is no silver bullet.
/ docs/bug121200.htm
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/indepth
IMO, the problem has nothing to do with designers or programmers. It has to do with the linguistic tools that we use to build software. We use languages to create sequential algorithms. The problem with algorithms is that their sequential nature makes it hard to predict the timing of events. It is the unforseen event that causes the nasty crashes.
Software will not come of age until we realize that computer science is really a subset of communication science. It can all be done with sensors and effectors and other objects sending signals and messages to each other. In hardware it's easy to to time events because of the parallelism. This is why hardware is so reliable: events arrive at their proper time. Not so with software. We need to emulate this parallelism in our software. We need to think in terms of *signals* and parallel objects.
MOBE2001