Re: software progress (RE: Hardware Progress: $319/GF)

From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Wed Sep 04 2002 - 20:59:35 MDT


Ben Goertzel wrote:
> Eugene,
>
> Of course, there is a great deal of truth in all that you say. I'd love to
> have cheap, frequently-rewritable Field-Programmable Gate Arrays too ;>
>
> But to me, the factors you mention are just "reasons why progress hasn't
> gone *even faster* than it has."
>
> They don't change the fact that, in practical terms, one can do a lot more
> with $1000 (or $10,000, or $100,000) of hardware than one could a few years
> in the past. And I think something similar is true with software. A team
> of good coders, in a month, can get a lot more done now than a decade ago,
> because of the Net's resources, because of visual debuggers, etc. etc. etc.
>
> -- Ben G
>

I have seen studies that say that a team of good Lisp coders can
get 20 times more done than a comparably good team in Java, C++
or C# in equal time. If this is even approximately true then
any savvy project should forget about *popular* languages and
grab such an overwhelming advantage.

Who are you kidding about the importance of vidual debuggers?
The ones for Java and such are just not that good, certainly not
as general or powerful as facilities in Smalltalk and Lisp for
quite some time.

-s.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:40 MDT