After 5 years of programming, my favorite language has become assembler - not because I hate HLL's, but rather, because you get exactly what you code in assembler. There are no "Leaky Abstractions" in assembly.
Ah, but you are wrong, and I'm speaking as someone who has written over 100,000 lines of assembly code. The great majority of the time, when you're faced with a programming problem, you don't want to think about that problem in terms of bits and and bytes and machine instructions and so on. You want to think about the problem in a more abstract way. After all, programming can be extremely difficult, and if you focus on the minute then you may never come up with a solution. And many high level abstractions simply do not exist in assembly language.
What does a closure look like in assembly? It doesn't exist as a concept. Even if you write code using closures in Lisp, compile to assembly language, and then look at the assembly language, the concept of a closure will not exist in the assembly listing. Period. Because it's a higher level concept. It's like talking about a piece of lumber when you're working on a molecular level. There's no such thing when you're viewing things in such a primitive way. "Lumber" only becomes a concept when you have a macroscopic view. Would you want to build a house using individual molecules or would you build a house out of lumber or brick?
I'm of the idea that the whole premise that high-level tools and high level abstraction coupled with encasulation are the biggest bane of the software industry.
Now that simply isn't true. Imagine you need to do reformat the data in a text file. In Perl, this is trivial, because you don't have to worry about buffer size and maximum line length, and so on. Plus you have a nice string type that lets you concatenate strings in a clean and efficient way.
If you wrote the same program in C, you'd have to be careful to avoid buffer overruns, you'd have to work without regular expressions (and if you use a library, then that's a high level abstraction, right?), and you have to suffer with awful functions like strcat (or write your own).
Is this really a win? What have you gained? Similarly, what will you have gained if you write a GUI-centric database querying application in C using raw Win32 calls instead of using Visual Basic? In the latter case, you'll write the same program in maybe 1/4 the time and it will have fewer bugs.
Learn some solid OOP and modern languages like Java, C#, C++. It takes years of experience to write well designed OO code.
He said he was looking to the future. C++ and Java--especially the former--are becoming the Cobol and Fortran of the 21st century, at least they are rapidly headed that way.
If you wanna talk languages, I'd focus on those that are very dynamic and light on their feet, such as Python. Besides letting you write more code very quickly, they're lots of fun. There's little joy in C++ for most tasks.
I get tired of people stacking the deck against Macs by claiming Macs cost too much, then inventing some insane price out of thin air, like $4500.
I didn't pull that out of thin air. I went to Apple's online store. The "Ultimate" Power Macintosh G4 Apple touts on the page--yes, the most expensive one of the four shown--is $4599. And my point was to keep people from using a machine like that as an example of how fast Macs are. Okay?
...that millions of people will upgrade from a PC using a 1GHz processor to a PC using a 2.5GHz processor even though they cannot tell the difference in performance at all. And in the process they put an old PC in a landfill and end up with one that uses more power than the last one.
I'm getting really, really, really tired of the extreme minority of PC users, such as people who annually put down $400 for a new video card, driving the entire PC upgrade cycle.
For example, if by having a PC and internet connection at home, it becomes possible to work from home, I wouldn't be surprised if the breakeven point between that and driving to work was reached very quickly.
So the 0.2% of people that this applies to makes it the general rule?
Note: I am not bashing Apple here. I have owned Macs.
How far can you really get with OS X and the 128MB these Powerbooks ship with? OS X is great, but the prevailing opinion is that it's more memory hungry than Windows. (It's quite possible that this is a myth. Reviewers love to say dumb things like "I highly recommend that you upgrade to 512MB if you plan on doing more than simple word processing.")
I'll add, of course, that 128MB uses less power than 256MB, which is important for laptops.
Everyone seems to quick with the flippant "they failed because they suck" comments. If you take a look at sales figures, though, you'll see that quite often some really good games end up with dismal sales figures. I'm not talking about infamous flops like Daikatana or Tresspasser, but pretty much any good game that isn't a mega-hit like Roller Coaster Tycoon or Age of Empires.
It is common for a game to get good reviews, good word of mouth, and then sell a mere 30,000 copies. You can't keep a game studio afloat on figures like that. Why do good games sometimes do that poorly? Often it is simply because everyone gravitates toward the same games.
Let's say you just bought a PlayStation 2 and go to the store to buy some games. Odds are you'll buy mega-hits like Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy X, and so on. Or maybe you'll go for titles in the $19.99 "Greatest Hits" lineup which you probably recognize. But would you take a chance on any of several dozen other games that don't have the mega-hit buzz? Probably not. And most people won't either.
The "engines" article talks about 20 passes per polygon and so on. Great! But the majority of machines being sold by Gateway and Dell are not even T&L equipped cards. We're talking pre-Radeon era ATI cards. Now you have people buying awesome, awesome machines with 1.8 GIGAhertz at the very bottom end, systems that John Carmack and Tim Sweeney couldn't have imagined ten years ago, but only the hardcore gaming types are bothering to get the $200-$400 video cards that games like Doom 3 are going to require. For Carmack it might work, but for everyone else it isn't worth three years and millions of dollars to develop a PC game that ends up selling 20,000 copies. That's a pretty realistic number these days.
Does anyone else miss 2D scrollers like Super Mario 3
Not really. Yes, at one time those games were great. Even when Sonic the Hedgehog came out in 1991--an awesome game--the genre was already getting stale and moldy. Then the thousand such games released in the next five years completely put the 2D scroller to bed.
There's nothing wrong with 2D scrolling games, except that everyone was just following the path chosen by Miyamoto. If you're tired of the current crop of PC games because they're derivative, the last thing you want to do is wistfully remember the most derivative game era of all time.
I keep seeing mentions of Forth being an interpreted language, but that's just an implementation choice. Most modern Forths, such as iForth, VFX Forth, and Forth Inc's own SwiftForth, generate machine code and do optimization to varying degrees. iForth and VFX Forth analyze stack operations and replace them with register operations where possible. Benchmarks have shown that iForth generates better floating point code than Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler (which already generates better floating point code than gcc).
So why don't you hear about Forth much? A couple of reasons:
1. Forth doesn't have much in the way of standard libraries, so you'll almost certainly get more bang for your time writing quickie applications in Perl or Python than Forth. Try writing a Forth program to read in a file of strings of arbitrary length and sort them, for example. This is a one liner in Perl.
2. Forth has always been geared toward simplicity, but modern desktop environments (Linux, Windows, MacOS) are hugely complex. Forth arguably isn't the best match for such complexity. Embedded systems are different.
3. Forth is best viewed as an interactive alternative to C or assembly language. Certainly from the interactivity alone Forth is a better choice for incrementally building a application than assembly language. This is why Forth gets a lot of use in embedded systems. But with desktop computer speeds being insanely high, it's hard to justify working on that kind of level under, say, Linux or Windows.
(I fully expect this to be followed by "Not true!" rantings from a Forth zealot or two. But you really do have a hard time pointing to compelling applications written in Forth for modern desktop OSes. Python is a good language, so you see some amazing applications written in it (e.g. Zope), but despite all the religion surrounding Forth, you never see much to show for it on the desktop.)
It's not about loving Linux. It's about loving Freedom (TM).
Realistically, though, we're talking about internet application development platforms here, not basic human rights. Being all high and mighty about not uing.NET is trifling at best, to say the least.
I know that there are some of you on here that will flame me saying that you DO use that power. And that's fine, you are the 1% of the population I mentioned earlier.
Everyone, of course, believes they're in that 1%.
I used to do commercial 3D video game development on a 450MHz P2. It was a bit slow when compiling, but acceptable otherwise. Then I upgraded to an 866MHz P3 and, even years later, it still feels like lightning. Compiles are quick. Everything is snappy. I've taken to writing tools in Perl and Lisp and Python, and they're snappy as well. I mean, geez, who would have thought ten years ago thay you'd ever be able write 3D geometry manipulation tools in Lisp and have no worries about performance?
Now, of course, you can buy a 2.5GHz P4 in an $800 PC. This is beyond ridiculous. Everything is three times faster than "beyond the point of caring"? I'm going to put C++ aside for almost everything, and just use whatever is the most abstract. Haskell? Yes, please.
Am I in the 1%? Certainly not.
It may help the economy in the short term, but you will just be wasting precious electricity (in this case gobs of it) just to say you have the latest and greatest. It's becoming a disease!
This bothers me, too. Yeah, people don't need all this performance, and that's okay. Who cares if your computer is too fast? But unfortunately you don't get all this performance for free. It's coming at the premature obsolescence of hardware and greatly increased power consumption. Hard drives and monitors are actually improving in this regard, especially with LCD monitors (awesome!). But now we have 70 watt processors and PCs that ship with five or more fans in them, and we're talking bottom end machines from Dell and Gateway here, not crazy high-end monsters. This is bad.
I played it when it first came out. It used VGA text mode for the graphics, so it was choppy compared to the original, but that's a nit. He added huge additional areas to the game (the additional areas are larger than the original game), which are accessible behind those vertical black lines (you need the black dot). But other than adding one new item, a whistle, I just found myself getting lost in the hundreds of new screens. In the original, about the longest distance you had to go was from the interior of the black castle to the interior of the white castle, which was annoying, but within reason. In Indenture, this distance has been increased by a factor of 5 or more. In short, it loses the charm of the original.
funny you mention trying to port the legend of zelda; someone ported a little tiny bit of sonic the hedgehog [lapoo.nl] to flash. it's pretty choppy, and not many moving sprites on the screen at once, but not TOO too bad.
Just to clarify, it's not a port. It's someone's attempt at writing his own version of Sonic. The levels are *much* smaller than the original for example. And if you really need some more evidence, there's only a boss at the end of each zone in Sonic, not at the end of the first level.
I see a lot of posters ranting away because they don't think LCD monitors save much desktop space. Okay, fine. But you're missing lots of other issues:
1. They're much lighter and easier to move. You don't need a heavy-duty desk that's able to withstand a 50lb monitor.
2. They're much, much easier to see in normal sunlight and well-lit rooms. No glare. Geez, just walk into Best Buy and look at how awful CRTs look in the store lighting.
3. A perfectly sharp, rock-solid image that is much easier on the eyes. It isn't worth sticking your head in the sand about this. It's your eyes we're talking about.
If you factor in the lower power consumption, we have a winner.
They just rewrote it. That paper reads like someone ran across Wall's paper, had an epiphany, and wrote an evangelical manifesto in support of Wall. There's nothing new at all here.
(And while I agree with the whole post-modern thing, at least in general, it is somewhat disturbing to find people reveling in the ugliness of solutions. Sure, we don't have to force the world into one paradigm, but there's a difference between making concessions to reality and being downright messy and ugly. PL/I was an ugly language, so does that mean we should bring it back because it was really post-modern?)
No Sony? No NEC?
on
LCD Round-up
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Kind of funny that two of the most highly regarded makes of LCD monitors are ignored.
From what I've understood, in most aspects of computing, synchronous data communication is preferable. IE, network cards, sound-cards, printers, etc. Don't better models support bi-directional synchronous communication?
You're just talking about I/O. Of course I/O has to be synchronous, because it involves handshaking.
I think there are some general misconceptions about what "asynchronous" means. Seriously, all I'm seeing are comments from people without a clue about chip design, other than what they read about at arstechnica.com or aceshardware.com. And if you don't know anything about the *real* internals of synchronous chips, then how can you blast asynchronous designs?
So-called asynchronous processors have already been designed and prototyped. Chuck Moore's recent (as in "ten years old") stack processors are mostly asynchronous, for example. Most people are only familiar with the x86 line, and to a lesser extent the PowerPC, and a much, much lesser extent the Alpha and UltraSPARC. Unless you've done some research into a *variety* of processor architectures, please refrain from commenting. Otherwise you come across like some kind of "Linux rules!" weenie who doesn't have a clue what else is out there besides (Windows, MacOS, and UNIX-variants).
No one understands how the brain works
on
Downloading The Mind
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Have you ever read the hardcore books on so-called brain science? Typically, one guy has been mulling over a theory about how the brain works for 10-30 years, then he writes a book about it. Other people do the same thing. All of the books contradict each other, or have nothing at all to do with each other, and there's no way of figuring out who's right. There are even books written simply to claim another book is incorrect ("The Mind Doesn't Work that Way," by Jerry A. Fodor).
The bottom line is that this is hardly a science at all, just a lot of conjecture.
While nostalgic, this kind of minimalism is misplaced in modern operating systems. When you write an application, even a small application, think of everything that goes on behind the scenes:
1. Using a single function in shared library brings in the entire library. 2. You're at the mercy of the code in shared libraries and drivers. Even if you write code in hand-optimized assembly language, what's the point when you have to call the OS or a driver in order to do graphics and I/O? 3. There's a relatively large cluster size under most filesystems, so saving a few bytes or even a few K can often be irrelevant. 4. Even simple things like memory access can cause interrupts during which the virtual memory system intervenes.
All the posts about "returning to the days of performance" and all that rubbish are completely off the mark.
Drop off a million discs in a truckload, and they'll just have someone on the maintenance staff cart them off. End of problem. But if you just mail each disc *back* to AOL, then they'll have to continually weed out all of the discs they get, possibly for years.
Slashdot Mirror
After 5 years of programming, my favorite language has become assembler - not because I hate HLL's, but rather, because you get exactly what you code in assembler. There are no "Leaky Abstractions" in assembly.
Ah, but you are wrong, and I'm speaking as someone who has written over 100,000 lines of assembly code. The great majority of the time, when you're faced with a programming problem, you don't want to think about that problem in terms of bits and and bytes and machine instructions and so on. You want to think about the problem in a more abstract way. After all, programming can be extremely difficult, and if you focus on the minute then you may never come up with a solution. And many high level abstractions simply do not exist in assembly language.
What does a closure look like in assembly? It doesn't exist as a concept. Even if you write code using closures in Lisp, compile to assembly language, and then look at the assembly language, the concept of a closure will not exist in the assembly listing. Period. Because it's a higher level concept. It's like talking about a piece of lumber when you're working on a molecular level. There's no such thing when you're viewing things in such a primitive way. "Lumber" only becomes a concept when you have a macroscopic view. Would you want to build a house using individual molecules or would you build a house out of lumber or brick?
I'm of the idea that the whole premise that high-level tools and high level abstraction coupled with encasulation are the biggest bane of the software industry.
Now that simply isn't true. Imagine you need to do reformat the data in a text file. In Perl, this is trivial, because you don't have to worry about buffer size and maximum line length, and so on. Plus you have a nice string type that lets you concatenate strings in a clean and efficient way.
If you wrote the same program in C, you'd have to be careful to avoid buffer overruns, you'd have to work without regular expressions (and if you use a library, then that's a high level abstraction, right?), and you have to suffer with awful functions like strcat (or write your own).
Is this really a win? What have you gained? Similarly, what will you have gained if you write a GUI-centric database querying application in C using raw Win32 calls instead of using Visual Basic? In the latter case, you'll write the same program in maybe 1/4 the time and it will have fewer bugs.
Learn some solid OOP and modern languages like Java, C#, C++. It takes years of experience to write well designed OO code.
He said he was looking to the future. C++ and Java--especially the former--are becoming the Cobol and Fortran of the 21st century, at least they are rapidly headed that way.
If you wanna talk languages, I'd focus on those that are very dynamic and light on their feet, such as Python. Besides letting you write more code very quickly, they're lots of fun. There's little joy in C++ for most tasks.
OpenGL on playstation2
It's a novelty and nothing more, like getting gcc to run on a Palm. There is not one single PS2 game that is written using OpenGL.
I get tired of people stacking the deck against Macs by claiming Macs cost too much, then inventing some insane price out of thin air, like $4500.
I didn't pull that out of thin air. I went to Apple's online store. The "Ultimate" Power Macintosh G4 Apple touts on the page--yes, the most expensive one of the four shown--is $4599. And my point was to keep people from using a machine like that as an example of how fast Macs are. Okay?
...that millions of people will upgrade from a PC using a 1GHz processor to a PC using a 2.5GHz processor even though they cannot tell the difference in performance at all. And in the process they put an old PC in a landfill and end up with one that uses more power than the last one.
I'm getting really, really, really tired of the extreme minority of PC users, such as people who annually put down $400 for a new video card, driving the entire PC upgrade cycle.
For example, if by having a PC and internet connection at home, it becomes possible to work from home, I wouldn't be surprised if the breakeven point between that and driving to work was reached very quickly.
So the 0.2% of people that this applies to makes it the general rule?
Note: I am not bashing Apple here. I have owned Macs.
How far can you really get with OS X and the 128MB these Powerbooks ship with? OS X is great, but the prevailing opinion is that it's more memory hungry than Windows. (It's quite possible that this is a myth. Reviewers love to say dumb things like "I highly recommend that you upgrade to 512MB if you plan on doing more than simple word processing.")
I'll add, of course, that 128MB uses less power than 256MB, which is important for laptops.
Everyone seems to quick with the flippant "they failed because they suck" comments. If you take a look at sales figures, though, you'll see that quite often some really good games end up with dismal sales figures. I'm not talking about infamous flops like Daikatana or Tresspasser, but pretty much any good game that isn't a mega-hit like Roller Coaster Tycoon or Age of Empires.
It is common for a game to get good reviews, good word of mouth, and then sell a mere 30,000 copies. You can't keep a game studio afloat on figures like that. Why do good games sometimes do that poorly? Often it is simply because everyone gravitates toward the same games.
Let's say you just bought a PlayStation 2 and go to the store to buy some games. Odds are you'll buy mega-hits like Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy X, and so on. Or maybe you'll go for titles in the $19.99 "Greatest Hits" lineup which you probably recognize. But would you take a chance on any of several dozen other games that don't have the mega-hit buzz? Probably not. And most people won't either.
id software has a large following so I seriously doubt it will only sell 20,000 games.
:P
You missed the "For John Carmack it might work..." part of the original post
Prince of Persia was a scroller that was pretty innovative; somewhat realistic graphics and gameplay, and you really had to use your brain.
:)
Except that it didn't scroll
The "engines" article talks about 20 passes per polygon and so on. Great! But the majority of machines being sold by Gateway and Dell are not even T&L equipped cards. We're talking pre-Radeon era ATI cards. Now you have people buying awesome, awesome machines with 1.8 GIGAhertz at the very bottom end, systems that John Carmack and Tim Sweeney couldn't have imagined ten years ago, but only the hardcore gaming types are bothering to get the $200-$400 video cards that games like Doom 3 are going to require. For Carmack it might work, but for everyone else it isn't worth three years and millions of dollars to develop a PC game that ends up selling 20,000 copies. That's a pretty realistic number these days.
Does anyone else miss 2D scrollers like Super Mario 3
Not really. Yes, at one time those games were great. Even when Sonic the Hedgehog came out in 1991--an awesome game--the genre was already getting stale and moldy. Then the thousand such games released in the next five years completely put the 2D scroller to bed.
There's nothing wrong with 2D scrolling games, except that everyone was just following the path chosen by Miyamoto. If you're tired of the current crop of PC games because they're derivative, the last thing you want to do is wistfully remember the most derivative game era of all time.
I keep seeing mentions of Forth being an interpreted language, but that's just an implementation choice. Most modern Forths, such as iForth, VFX Forth, and Forth Inc's own SwiftForth, generate machine code and do optimization to varying degrees. iForth and VFX Forth analyze stack operations and replace them with register operations where possible. Benchmarks have shown that iForth generates better floating point code than Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler (which already generates better floating point code than gcc).
So why don't you hear about Forth much? A couple of reasons:
1. Forth doesn't have much in the way of standard libraries, so you'll almost certainly get more bang for your time writing quickie applications in Perl or Python than Forth. Try writing a Forth program to read in a file of strings of arbitrary length and sort them, for example. This is a one liner in Perl.
2. Forth has always been geared toward simplicity, but modern desktop environments (Linux, Windows, MacOS) are hugely complex. Forth arguably isn't the best match for such complexity. Embedded systems are different.
3. Forth is best viewed as an interactive alternative to C or assembly language. Certainly from the interactivity alone Forth is a better choice for incrementally building a application than assembly language. This is why Forth gets a lot of use in embedded systems. But with desktop computer speeds being insanely high, it's hard to justify working on that kind of level under, say, Linux or Windows.
(I fully expect this to be followed by "Not true!" rantings from a Forth zealot or two. But you really do have a hard time pointing to compelling applications written in Forth for modern desktop OSes. Python is a good language, so you see some amazing applications written in it (e.g. Zope), but despite all the religion surrounding Forth, you never see much to show for it on the desktop.)
It's not about loving Linux. It's about loving Freedom (TM).
.NET is trifling at best, to say the least.
Realistically, though, we're talking about internet application development platforms here, not basic human rights. Being all high and mighty about not uing
I know that there are some of you on here that will flame me saying that you DO use that power. And that's fine, you are the 1% of the population I mentioned earlier.
Everyone, of course, believes they're in that 1%.
I used to do commercial 3D video game development on a 450MHz P2. It was a bit slow when compiling, but acceptable otherwise. Then I upgraded to an 866MHz P3 and, even years later, it still feels like lightning. Compiles are quick. Everything is snappy. I've taken to writing tools in Perl and Lisp and Python, and they're snappy as well. I mean, geez, who would have thought ten years ago thay you'd ever be able write 3D geometry manipulation tools in Lisp and have no worries about performance?
Now, of course, you can buy a 2.5GHz P4 in an $800 PC. This is beyond ridiculous. Everything is three times faster than "beyond the point of caring"? I'm going to put C++ aside for almost everything, and just use whatever is the most abstract. Haskell? Yes, please.
Am I in the 1%? Certainly not.
It may help the economy in the short term, but you will just be wasting precious electricity (in this case gobs of it) just to say you have the latest and greatest. It's becoming a disease!
This bothers me, too. Yeah, people don't need all this performance, and that's okay. Who cares if your computer is too fast? But unfortunately you don't get all this performance for free. It's coming at the premature obsolescence of hardware and greatly increased power consumption. Hard drives and monitors are actually improving in this regard, especially with LCD monitors (awesome!). But now we have 70 watt processors and PCs that ship with five or more fans in them, and we're talking bottom end machines from Dell and Gateway here, not crazy high-end monsters. This is bad.
...is Craig Pell's Indenture.
I played it when it first came out. It used VGA text mode for the graphics, so it was choppy compared to the original, but that's a nit. He added huge additional areas to the game (the additional areas are larger than the original game), which are accessible behind those vertical black lines (you need the black dot). But other than adding one new item, a whistle, I just found myself getting lost in the hundreds of new screens. In the original, about the longest distance you had to go was from the interior of the black castle to the interior of the white castle, which was annoying, but within reason. In Indenture, this distance has been increased by a factor of 5 or more. In short, it loses the charm of the original.
Isn't "original remake" an oxymoron?
funny you mention trying to port the legend of zelda; someone ported a little tiny bit of sonic the hedgehog [lapoo.nl] to flash. it's pretty choppy, and not many moving sprites on the screen at once, but not TOO too bad.
Just to clarify, it's not a port. It's someone's attempt at writing his own version of Sonic. The levels are *much* smaller than the original for example. And if you really need some more evidence, there's only a boss at the end of each zone in Sonic, not at the end of the first level.
But it is still fairly impressive for Flash.
I see a lot of posters ranting away because they don't think LCD monitors save much desktop space. Okay, fine. But you're missing lots of other issues:
1. They're much lighter and easier to move. You don't need a heavy-duty desk that's able to withstand a 50lb monitor.
2. They're much, much easier to see in normal sunlight and well-lit rooms. No glare. Geez, just walk into Best Buy and look at how awful CRTs look in the store lighting.
3. A perfectly sharp, rock-solid image that is much easier on the eyes. It isn't worth sticking your head in the sand about this. It's your eyes we're talking about.
If you factor in the lower power consumption, we have a winner.
They just rewrote it. That paper reads like someone ran across Wall's paper, had an epiphany, and wrote an evangelical manifesto in support of Wall. There's nothing new at all here.
(And while I agree with the whole post-modern thing, at least in general, it is somewhat disturbing to find people reveling in the ugliness of solutions. Sure, we don't have to force the world into one paradigm, but there's a difference between making concessions to reality and being downright messy and ugly. PL/I was an ugly language, so does that mean we should bring it back because it was really post-modern?)
Kind of funny that two of the most highly regarded makes of LCD monitors are ignored.
From what I've understood, in most aspects of computing, synchronous data communication is preferable. IE, network cards, sound-cards, printers, etc. Don't better models support bi-directional synchronous communication?
You're just talking about I/O. Of course I/O has to be synchronous, because it involves handshaking.
I think there are some general misconceptions about what "asynchronous" means. Seriously, all I'm seeing are comments from people without a clue about chip design, other than what they read about at arstechnica.com or aceshardware.com. And if you don't know anything about the *real* internals of synchronous chips, then how can you blast asynchronous designs?
So-called asynchronous processors have already been designed and prototyped. Chuck Moore's recent (as in "ten years old") stack processors are mostly asynchronous, for example. Most people are only familiar with the x86 line, and to a lesser extent the PowerPC, and a much, much lesser extent the Alpha and UltraSPARC. Unless you've done some research into a *variety* of processor architectures, please refrain from commenting. Otherwise you come across like some kind of "Linux rules!" weenie who doesn't have a clue what else is out there besides (Windows, MacOS, and UNIX-variants).
Have you ever read the hardcore books on so-called brain science? Typically, one guy has been mulling over a theory about how the brain works for 10-30 years, then he writes a book about it. Other people do the same thing. All of the books contradict each other, or have nothing at all to do with each other, and there's no way of figuring out who's right. There are even books written simply to claim another book is incorrect ("The Mind Doesn't Work that Way," by Jerry A. Fodor).
The bottom line is that this is hardly a science at all, just a lot of conjecture.
While nostalgic, this kind of minimalism is misplaced in modern operating systems. When you write an application, even a small application, think of everything that goes on behind the scenes:
1. Using a single function in shared library brings in the entire library.
2. You're at the mercy of the code in shared libraries and drivers. Even if you write code in hand-optimized assembly language, what's the point when you have to call the OS or a driver in order to do graphics and I/O?
3. There's a relatively large cluster size under most filesystems, so saving a few bytes or even a few K can often be irrelevant.
4. Even simple things like memory access can cause interrupts during which the virtual memory system intervenes.
All the posts about "returning to the days of performance" and all that rubbish are completely off the mark.
Drop off a million discs in a truckload, and they'll just have someone on the maintenance staff cart them off. End of problem. But if you just mail each disc *back* to AOL, then they'll have to continually weed out all of the discs they get, possibly for years.