Re: Where do we go from here? (was: Re: Can anyone identify this card?)

[Matt Jenkins <mdj@bob.dynalias.net>]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 07:26:43 +0000, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
 
> Moore's "Law" was always an economic principle, not a physical
> principle (though the phycal "scalability" of silicon structures is
> what makes it possible, at least for another few generations).

Totally agree. I also feel that we may see it 'slow down' for a period
of time until the software industry catches up.
 
> You are suggesting that the reason we do not have a new crop of
> compelling applications is that our software tools are too weak to
> allow them to be developed.  Interesting.  Certainly better tools are
> always useful, but one must have an idea of what to do with them.

Good point. The introduction of the Macintosh (I far better tool than any
that had come before) nearly failed, but was saved by the emergence of 
desktop publishing. Had that not happened, the Macintosh probably would
have disappeared (at least in that case we may have seen the Apple II line
extended further). But certainly one can see that without the richer
development environment provided by MacOS, a tool like PageMaker would've
taken far longer to emerge.

> If the past is any guide to the future, I expect the next generation of
> compelling apps to be invented outside the corporate sphere, and
> implemented by a few free agents.  The power of their application(s)
> will not be in their cute interfaces, but in their stunning ability to
> do things that people have wished to do, but considered impossible.

I'd certainly agree with that, and in a way that supports my argument.
Many of the great achievements that moved things forward in the software
industry were developed by very small groups and often individuals. It's
not often that large corporations come up with the 'next big thing'.
However the present state software development still build upon tools that
are now nearly 30 years old (Unix and C, albeit with Object Oriented
extensions). While the last few years have seen a lot of software
development innovation in the Java arena, this has been mainly constrained
to server side applications, and really isn't accomplishing anything that
wasn't possible 15 years earlier with NeXTStep.

Even back in the day of the Apple II, the UCSD Pascal environment (which 
pretty much pushed the Apple II to its limits) allowed me to build 
software much faster than I could by developing things raw in 6502,
and anything that ran particularly slowly could usually be fixed just
by rewriting one or two critial procedures in assembly and linking them in.

When developing software these days (in Java) I feel frustrated with the
amount of time it takes to develop anything relatively sophisticated.
Things like GUI development, which by now should be so simple to achieve
we can get non-developers to do the work, is still time consuming and
laborious. The compile/test/debug loop times are still just as long as
there were 10 years ago, owing to the increase in complexity. I just don't
see how it's possible for us to reach new levels of sophistication when
so much mind power is consumed by the existing processes.

>I cannot escape the irony and appropriateness of this discussion in
>a forum dedicated to one of the machines that truly ignited the world
>of applications that we use today.  Perhaps someone involved in that
>first ignition can point the way to another.

I'm with you there. Really though, computers have always been used to
automate already existing processes to manipulate information and media.
At this point in time, there aren't really any forms of media left that
aren't computer automated. The intersting thing now is how to leverage
the digital forms of those mediums in new ways. The WWW is a first step
along this path, but as history has shown, even when new and better ideas
present themselves, it can sometimes be a decade or more before the value
of them is appreciated by a large enough mass of people to bring it into
the mainstream.

Cheers,

Matt