And while you're at it, you might as well read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis. Without multithreading, of course, since multithreading is the biggest and most hideous abomination of them all.
Re:I Hate All Programming Languages
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Funny. In my opinion, Labview, too, is an abomination. A truly compositional programming environment should be based strictly on a hierarchical tree. That is to say, the program should look like a tree and should be a branch in the universal tree of all software applications.
I Hate All Programming Languages
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Coders At Work
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Perl is an abomination as a language
LOL. From my perspective, all computer programming languages are abominations. They are ancient primitive relics of what I call the Babbage and Lovelace era. They should all be placed in the Smithsonian right next to the buggy whip and the slide rule. I live for the day when a constitutional amendment is passed to ban them all.:-D
My stuff speaks for itself. My point was and is that anybody who accuses me of being a crackpot in public should publically identify himself or herself. And yes, it is all about gonads and the lacks thereof. It takes guts to be accountable to one's words.
Ad hominems are personal opinions. They smack of cowardice, especially when they are anonymous. It's a chicken shit way of trying to destroy a message without taking the time and the effort to address it. Opinions are a dime a dozen. A well-formed argument, on the other hand, is priceless.
At least you post with what seems to be your real name, which may take a little bit of gonads. Not what I really would call identifying oneself though, as I'm sure there are many Bill Stewarts out there.
Everybody knows who I am as I am not afraid of expressing my ideas but who are YOU, really? What have you done that someone can associate you with? If you're going to attack me ad hominem, I want to know who you are so I can prepare a proper defense.
The whole space-based power thing is just a science geek's wet dream. It will never happen. You might as well forget about a world powered by wind, sunlight, tides, ocean waves, algae, corn, sugar cane, etc. All that stuff is excruciatingly primitive and will not succeed in the long run.
The amazing truth is that, like fish in the ocean, we are swimming in wall-to-wall energy but we can't see it. Why? Because we are blinded by our current assumptions about how bodies really move. Soon though, all that will change because not everybody is making the same assumptions about motion. A few mavericks are thinking deep thoughts. Get ready for the age of infinite free energy and true zero emissions.
It does not matter. Anybody or organization who comes out with the right solution will start a revolution and the others will be caught by surprise and forced to go along. All it will take is a few kick-ass products like say, a smart phone that instantly translates a japanese restaurant menu into a chosen language, at the click of a button; or one that recognizes somebody's face whose name you had forgotten; or a portable translation service, etc.
Any processor that can support such advanced products will blow everything else out of the water. Such is the promise of parallelism and the radical new software paradigm that will make such applications easy to construct even by amateurs.
My point is that software is about to become practically free and software companies will not be able to compete. Why? Because the next computer revolution will make it possible for customers to very cheaply construct their own software from freely available parts. Oracle is bound to suffer as customers begin to migrate to free applications. By the way, Intel would be surprised to find out that hardware is not profitable.
Oracle must hold on to the hardware division at all costs. The financial future of the computer industry is in hardware, not software. Software will be extremely cheap because necessity is about to unleash a revolution in software construction methodology that will turn every computer user into a programmer whether they know it or not. The future of profits in this industry is going to be strictly about who has the baddest, fastest and most energy-efficient parallel processors. The software will just sprout like mushrooms.
The painful (and scary to many) transition to parallel computing and the crisis that has ensued does not bode well for the status quo. Who would want to spend millions or billions converting legacy software into multi-threaded code only to find out afterwards that multithreading is not the part of the future of parallel computing. The baby boomer generation (the Turing Machine worshippers) whose bankrupt ideas on computing led to this cisis must be forcibly retired even if it creates an uproar. This will allow new minds and new ideas to flourish so that the industry can leap beyond last century's flawed paradigms and forge a new future.
Oracle has an unprecedented opportunity to make a killing by doing the right move. Sun's hardware engineers are a talented bunch and it would be a dumb idea to let them go. But if the sale goes through, I hope HP realizes the importance of hardware and immediately start dumping loads of cash into another big-chip parallel processing project (and please do not resurrect the Rock project).
Having said that, the solution to the parallel programming crisis that will revolutionize computer programming means building a new type of computer to support a radically different programming model. There is no escaping this. Read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis for more on this topic.
I am not saying that Newton was 100% right or that Einstein was 100% wrong. I am saying that Newton was right about gravity being instantaneous and Einstein was wrong about same. That's my take on it and you're free to disagree, of course.
Until and unless physicists can explain gravity from first principles, all they got is Ptolemaic epicycles, IMO. The hard truth is that physicists are just as ignorant about the nature of gravity as the man in the street. A little humility would do them a lot of good.
No, science adjusts models to accommodates new data
You mean, for example, how physicists invent superstitious nonsense like dark matter and dark energy to explain data that contradicts their pet theories (e.g., general relativity)? Of course not. That would be preposterous.:-D
By the way, did any of you know that nothing can move in spacetime, by definition? Surprise! In Conjectures and Refutations, Sir Karl Popper (of falsifiability fame) called spacetime "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens". Popper compared Einstein to good old Parmenides who, whith his devoted pupil Zeno, also maintained that nothing can move and that change was an illusion! And yet spacetime is the central model of modern cosmology. ahahaha...
Folks, the reason that gravity waves have not been found is simple: Einstein was wrong. Gravity is a nonlocal phenomenon and is instantaneous, just as Sir Isaac assumed centuries ago. This is the reason that Newtonian gravity is so accurate. Isn't it time for science to adjust the model to accomodate the data? I think so.
Programming is done with languages because programming is communication. It's communication between programmer and computer.
Sure, this what it is now because the computer, as we know it, was originally invented by mathematicians for mathematicians (Babbage and Lovelace). As we all know, mathematicians are obssessed with algorithms, i.e., language. The truth is that programming, like all activities having to do with constructing something, should be about construction and nothing else. We understand what we want to construct. We should not have to express it it in a language unless we absolutely have to. Construction implies things like building blocks, parts, and effective tools with which to manipulate said blocks and parts. It has very little to do with syntax, keywords and vocabularies.
Rile as much as you want but the future of computing is not linguistic. It is time to move away from the current descriptive nature of programming to one that is purely constructive. This is where things are going and neither you nor anybody else can stop it. Sorry.
Will the huge Minority-Report-touch-screen we'll all have in our homes be a result of this architecture you're describing or will it be a requirement for developing it?
Interesting that you should mention this because I wrote about it on my blog some time ago. Well, it was actually about Jeff Han's multi-touch screen technology, which is the same thing. So yes, I think it will be an ideal interface for the future of parallel programming.
Let me add that the main reason that compositional development tools have failed is that they are inherently algorithmic. What is needed is an implicitly parallel model.
So who do you think will be writing the "components" for your magic system, and the infrastructure to make the system executable, designable, testable and usable? We have been progressing to increasingly high level code (and in some cases, as you say, component architectures), but the amount of code being written and maintained continues to grow, not shrink.
If software apps were purely compositional and organized as a hierarchical tree, the low level components would need to be written only once. Once the bottom levels (mostly leaves) of the tree become populated, then all of the higher level apps will be compositions of existing objects. Plug and play. The trick is in the purely compositional part: everything must be compositional from the bottom up.
So the amount of code is growing, and it does more per unit mass, and software engineering skills are increasingly valuable and applicable, and you think this is a trend towards the elimination of code and software engineers? You may want to check your water and food sources for contamination.
I think it will be the elimination of the traditional programmer, because a time is coming when everybody will be a programmer whether they know it or not. Drag'm and drop'm, that sort of thing.
Thanks for referring to me in the third person but you're making my point for me. Nobody wants to get mired into tedious code unless you're autistic or something. Programming should not engineering. It should be just design and design IS art. It's creativity. The engineering stuff should be taken care of automatically by the design tools. Anytime that "clarity of thought" and high salaries are necessary, it's a sure sign that automation would and will be better. Nobody can stop this kind of progress because the complete elimination of labor costs is one of the main goals of doing business in a capitalist system. Kind of ironic since the elimination of labor would destroy capitalism in the end.
Anyway, I do realize that my thesis is not going to get me a lot of love flowing from software engineers since what I am proposing will make them all obsolete, myself included. But, like it or lump it, this is the future. And it's much closer than you think.
"I hate computer languages because they force me to learn a bunch of shit that are completely irrelevant to what I want to use them for. When I design an application, I just want to build it. I don't want to have to use a complex language to describe my intentions to a compiler. Here is what I want to do: I want to look into my bag of components, pick out the ones that I need and snap them together, and that's it! That's all I want to do." Quoted from Why I Hate All Programming Languages.
Functional languages are worse because they are painfully counterintuitive. I don't want to write a function if all I want to do is link a sensor directly to an effector. Drawing a line from A to B is an order of magnitude simpler. Which is the way it should be.
This will give a new argument against those who object to the possibility of building truly intelligent computers on the basis that they are not living organisms.
The next computer revolution will make the first one pale in comparison. As soon as we find solutions to the parallel programming crisis and the software reliability/productivity crisis, innovation will explode. Current programming languages are primitive relics of the 20th century. What is needed is a new software construction methodology that turns everybody and their uncle into a computer programmer. See Why I Hate All Computer Programming Languages.
This is essentially what it comes down to. Does OpenCL make parallel programming of heterogeneous processors easy? The answer is no, of course, and the reason is not hard to understand. Multicore CPUs and GPUs are two incompatible approaches to parallel computing. The former is based on concurrent threads and MIMD (multiple instructions, multiple data) while the latter uses an SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) configuration. They are fundamentally different and no single interface will get around that fact. OpenCL (or CUDA) is really two languages in one. Programmers will have to frequently flip their mode of thinking in order to take effective advantage of both technologies and this is the primary reason that heterogeneous processors will be a pain to program. The other is multithreading, which, as we all know, is a royal pain in the arse in its own right.
Obviously what it needed is a new universal parallel software model, one that is supported by a single *homogeneous* processor architecture. Unfortunately for the major players, they have so much money and resources invested in last century's processor technologies that they are stuck in a rut of their own making. They are like the Titanic on a collision course with a monster iceberg. Unless the big players are willing and able to make an about-face in their thinking (can a Titanic turn on a dime?), I am afraid that the solution to the parallel programming crisis will have to come from elsewhere. A true maverick startup will eventually turn up and revolutionize the computer industry. And then there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth among the old guard.
I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. What would truly be a giant step for robots and AI is to build a robot that can learn to crawl like a baby, and then walk, go up and down the stairs, run and eventually drive a cab around New York city.
If your robot can do that, then you're the man and everybody will flock around from distant lands to worship at your feet and kiss your ass.
Sorry, nonlocality does not imply fater than light communication. Those who worry about faster than light travel simply do not understand the science of nonlocality. Nonlocality means nonspatiality, i.e., distance is an illusion. There is no transmission of information between two entangled particles. They are facets of the same coin. Nonspatiality should be a wake-up call to physicists, IMO. The paradigm shifting implications threaten to revolutionize physics. Thomas Kuhn comes to mind.
My entire point is that one does not do science by insisting that we abandon logic. Science is the result of applying logic to our observations and correcting the false assumptions in our models of nature until things make sense. Anything else is voodoo and superstition.
Voodoo science is what quantum computing scientists are doing, IMO. It's really chicken shit, on the face of it. Why? Because they have no understanding of the foundational issues.
(By the way, one does not need Bell's inequality to figure out that space is an illusion. Simple logic tells us that.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's all done with sensors and effectors.
I see your points but I think you should read Parallel Computing: Why the Future is Compositional... and hierarchical... and non-algorithmic... and deterministic... etc.
And while you're at it, you might as well read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis. Without multithreading, of course, since multithreading is the biggest and most hideous abomination of them all.
Funny. In my opinion, Labview, too, is an abomination. A truly compositional programming environment should be based strictly on a hierarchical tree. That is to say, the program should look like a tree and should be a branch in the universal tree of all software applications.
LOL. From my perspective, all computer programming languages are abominations. They are ancient primitive relics of what I call the Babbage and Lovelace era. They should all be placed in the Smithsonian right next to the buggy whip and the slide rule. I live for the day when a constitutional amendment is passed to ban them all. :-D
Your momma.
ahahaha...
My stuff speaks for itself. My point was and is that anybody who accuses me of being a crackpot in public should publically identify himself or herself. And yes, it is all about gonads and the lacks thereof. It takes guts to be accountable to one's words.
Ad hominems are personal opinions. They smack of cowardice, especially when they are anonymous. It's a chicken shit way of trying to destroy a message without taking the time and the effort to address it. Opinions are a dime a dozen. A well-formed argument, on the other hand, is priceless.
At least you post with what seems to be your real name, which may take a little bit of gonads. Not what I really would call identifying oneself though, as I'm sure there are many Bill Stewarts out there.
Everybody knows who I am as I am not afraid of expressing my ideas but who are YOU, really? What have you done that someone can associate you with? If you're going to attack me ad hominem, I want to know who you are so I can prepare a proper defense.
The whole space-based power thing is just a science geek's wet dream. It will never happen. You might as well forget about a world powered by wind, sunlight, tides, ocean waves, algae, corn, sugar cane, etc. All that stuff is excruciatingly primitive and will not succeed in the long run.
The amazing truth is that, like fish in the ocean, we are swimming in wall-to-wall energy but we can't see it. Why? Because we are blinded by our current assumptions about how bodies really move. Soon though, all that will change because not everybody is making the same assumptions about motion. A few mavericks are thinking deep thoughts. Get ready for the age of infinite free energy and true zero emissions.
Nasty Little Truth About Motion
It does not matter. Anybody or organization who comes out with the right solution will start a revolution and the others will be caught by surprise and forced to go along. All it will take is a few kick-ass products like say, a smart phone that instantly translates a japanese restaurant menu into a chosen language, at the click of a button; or one that recognizes somebody's face whose name you had forgotten; or a portable translation service, etc.
Any processor that can support such advanced products will blow everything else out of the water. Such is the promise of parallelism and the radical new software paradigm that will make such applications easy to construct even by amateurs.
My point is that software is about to become practically free and software companies will not be able to compete. Why? Because the next computer revolution will make it possible for customers to very cheaply construct their own software from freely available parts. Oracle is bound to suffer as customers begin to migrate to free applications. By the way, Intel would be surprised to find out that hardware is not profitable.
Oracle must hold on to the hardware division at all costs. The financial future of the computer industry is in hardware, not software. Software will be extremely cheap because necessity is about to unleash a revolution in software construction methodology that will turn every computer user into a programmer whether they know it or not. The future of profits in this industry is going to be strictly about who has the baddest, fastest and most energy-efficient parallel processors. The software will just sprout like mushrooms.
The painful (and scary to many) transition to parallel computing and the crisis that has ensued does not bode well for the status quo. Who would want to spend millions or billions converting legacy software into multi-threaded code only to find out afterwards that multithreading is not the part of the future of parallel computing. The baby boomer generation (the Turing Machine worshippers) whose bankrupt ideas on computing led to this cisis must be forcibly retired even if it creates an uproar. This will allow new minds and new ideas to flourish so that the industry can leap beyond last century's flawed paradigms and forge a new future.
Oracle has an unprecedented opportunity to make a killing by doing the right move. Sun's hardware engineers are a talented bunch and it would be a dumb idea to let them go. But if the sale goes through, I hope HP realizes the importance of hardware and immediately start dumping loads of cash into another big-chip parallel processing project (and please do not resurrect the Rock project).
Having said that, the solution to the parallel programming crisis that will revolutionize computer programming means building a new type of computer to support a radically different programming model. There is no escaping this. Read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis for more on this topic.
In other news, Nvidia's Boss: Kill Your Company a Bit Every Day
I am not saying that Newton was 100% right or that Einstein was 100% wrong. I am saying that Newton was right about gravity being instantaneous and Einstein was wrong about same. That's my take on it and you're free to disagree, of course.
Until and unless physicists can explain gravity from first principles, all they got is Ptolemaic epicycles, IMO. The hard truth is that physicists are just as ignorant about the nature of gravity as the man in the street. A little humility would do them a lot of good.
You mean, for example, how physicists invent superstitious nonsense like dark matter and dark energy to explain data that contradicts their pet theories (e.g., general relativity)? Of course not. That would be preposterous. :-D
By the way, did any of you know that nothing can move in spacetime, by definition? Surprise! In Conjectures and Refutations, Sir Karl Popper (of falsifiability fame) called spacetime "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens". Popper compared Einstein to good old Parmenides who, whith his devoted pupil Zeno, also maintained that nothing can move and that change was an illusion! And yet spacetime is the central model of modern cosmology. ahahaha...
Folks, the reason that gravity waves have not been found is simple: Einstein was wrong. Gravity is a nonlocal phenomenon and is instantaneous, just as Sir Isaac assumed centuries ago. This is the reason that Newtonian gravity is so accurate. Isn't it time for science to adjust the model to accomodate the data? I think so.
Sure, this what it is now because the computer, as we know it, was originally invented by mathematicians for mathematicians (Babbage and Lovelace). As we all know, mathematicians are obssessed with algorithms, i.e., language. The truth is that programming, like all activities having to do with constructing something, should be about construction and nothing else. We understand what we want to construct. We should not have to express it it in a language unless we absolutely have to. Construction implies things like building blocks, parts, and effective tools with which to manipulate said blocks and parts. It has very little to do with syntax, keywords and vocabularies.
Rile as much as you want but the future of computing is not linguistic. It is time to move away from the current descriptive nature of programming to one that is purely constructive. This is where things are going and neither you nor anybody else can stop it. Sorry.
Interesting that you should mention this because I wrote about it on my blog some time ago. Well, it was actually about Jeff Han's multi-touch screen technology, which is the same thing. So yes, I think it will be an ideal interface for the future of parallel programming.
Let me add that the main reason that compositional development tools have failed is that they are inherently algorithmic. What is needed is an implicitly parallel model.
So who do you think will be writing the "components" for your magic system, and the infrastructure to make the system executable, designable, testable and usable? We have been progressing to increasingly high level code (and in some cases, as you say, component architectures), but the amount of code being written and maintained continues to grow, not shrink.
If software apps were purely compositional and organized as a hierarchical tree, the low level components would need to be written only once. Once the bottom levels (mostly leaves) of the tree become populated, then all of the higher level apps will be compositions of existing objects. Plug and play. The trick is in the purely compositional part: everything must be compositional from the bottom up.
So the amount of code is growing, and it does more per unit mass, and software engineering skills are increasingly valuable and applicable, and you think this is a trend towards the elimination of code and software engineers? You may want to check your water and food sources for contamination.
I think it will be the elimination of the traditional programmer, because a time is coming when everybody will be a programmer whether they know it or not. Drag'm and drop'm, that sort of thing.
Thanks for referring to me in the third person but you're making my point for me. Nobody wants to get mired into tedious code unless you're autistic or something. Programming should not engineering. It should be just design and design IS art. It's creativity. The engineering stuff should be taken care of automatically by the design tools. Anytime that "clarity of thought" and high salaries are necessary, it's a sure sign that automation would and will be better. Nobody can stop this kind of progress because the complete elimination of labor costs is one of the main goals of doing business in a capitalist system. Kind of ironic since the elimination of labor would destroy capitalism in the end.
Anyway, I do realize that my thesis is not going to get me a lot of love flowing from software engineers since what I am proposing will make them all obsolete, myself included. But, like it or lump it, this is the future. And it's much closer than you think.
"I hate computer languages because they force me to learn a bunch of shit that are completely irrelevant to what I want to use them for. When I design an application, I just want to build it. I don't want to have to use a complex language to describe my intentions to a compiler. Here is what I want to do: I want to look into my bag of components, pick out the ones that I need and snap them together, and that's it! That's all I want to do." Quoted from Why I Hate All Programming Languages.
Functional languages are worse because they are painfully counterintuitive. I don't want to write a function if all I want to do is link a sensor directly to an effector. Drawing a line from A to B is an order of magnitude simpler. Which is the way it should be.
This will give a new argument against those who object to the possibility of building truly intelligent computers on the basis that they are not living organisms.
The next computer revolution will make the first one pale in comparison. As soon as we find solutions to the parallel programming crisis and the software reliability/productivity crisis, innovation will explode. Current programming languages are primitive relics of the 20th century. What is needed is a new software construction methodology that turns everybody and their uncle into a computer programmer. See Why I Hate All Computer Programming Languages.
This is essentially what it comes down to. Does OpenCL make parallel programming of heterogeneous processors easy? The answer is no, of course, and the reason is not hard to understand. Multicore CPUs and GPUs are two incompatible approaches to parallel computing. The former is based on concurrent threads and MIMD (multiple instructions, multiple data) while the latter uses an SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) configuration. They are fundamentally different and no single interface will get around that fact. OpenCL (or CUDA) is really two languages in one. Programmers will have to frequently flip their mode of thinking in order to take effective advantage of both technologies and this is the primary reason that heterogeneous processors will be a pain to program. The other is multithreading, which, as we all know, is a royal pain in the arse in its own right.
Obviously what it needed is a new universal parallel software model, one that is supported by a single *homogeneous* processor architecture. Unfortunately for the major players, they have so much money and resources invested in last century's processor technologies that they are stuck in a rut of their own making. They are like the Titanic on a collision course with a monster iceberg. Unless the big players are willing and able to make an about-face in their thinking (can a Titanic turn on a dime?), I am afraid that the solution to the parallel programming crisis will have to come from elsewhere. A true maverick startup will eventually turn up and revolutionize the computer industry. And then there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth among the old guard.
Read How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis if you're interested in an alternative approach to parallel computing.
I'll tell you what. As soon as you explain why bodies fall I'll provide an explanation for the double slit experiment.
In the meantime, keep on kissing ass and see if I care. And since I seem to have been drawn into a pissing contest, fuck you too. How about that?
I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. What would truly be a giant step for robots and AI is to build a robot that can learn to crawl like a baby, and then walk, go up and down the stairs, run and eventually drive a cab around New York city.
If your robot can do that, then you're the man and everybody will flock around from distant lands to worship at your feet and kiss your ass.
Sorry, nonlocality does not imply fater than light communication. Those who worry about faster than light travel simply do not understand the science of nonlocality. Nonlocality means nonspatiality, i.e., distance is an illusion. There is no transmission of information between two entangled particles. They are facets of the same coin. Nonspatiality should be a wake-up call to physicists, IMO. The paradigm shifting implications threaten to revolutionize physics. Thomas Kuhn comes to mind.
My entire point is that one does not do science by insisting that we abandon logic. Science is the result of applying logic to our observations and correcting the false assumptions in our models of nature until things make sense. Anything else is voodoo and superstition.
Voodoo science is what quantum computing scientists are doing, IMO. It's really chicken shit, on the face of it. Why? Because they have no understanding of the foundational issues.
(By the way, one does not need Bell's inequality to figure out that space is an illusion. Simple logic tells us that.)