Criticism of The Current State of Programming
- David May FRS a British computer scientist and currently Professor of Computer Science at University of Bristol and founder and CTO of XMOS Semiconductor, believes one of the problems is that there is a reliance on Moore's law to solve inefficiencies. He has advanced an 'alternative' to Moore's law (May's law) stated as follows:
Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law
He goes on to stateIn ubiquitous systems, halving the instructions executed can double the battery life and big data sets bring big opportunities for better software and algorithms: Reducing the number of operations from N x N to N x log(N) has a dramatic effect when N is large... for N = 30 billion, this change is as good as 50 years of technology improvements
- Software author Adam N. Rosenburg in his blog "The failure of the Digital computer", has described the current state of programming as nearing the "Software event horizon", (alluding to the fictitious "shoe event horizon" described by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book). He estimates there has been a 70 dB factor loss of productivity or "99.99999 percent, of its ability to deliver the goods", since the 1980s—"When Arthur C. Clarke compared the reality of computing in 2001 to the computer HAL in his book 2001: A Space Odyssey, he pointed out how wonderfully small and powerful computers were but how disappointing computer programming had become".
- Conrad Weisert gives examples, some of which were published in ACM SIGPLAN (Special Interest Group on Programming Languages) Notices, December 1995 in: "Atrocious Programming Thrives"
- Marc Andreessen co-founder of Netscape is quoted in "Mavericks at Work" (ISBN 0060779616) as saying "Five great programmers can completely outperform 1,000 mediocre programmers."
Read more about this topic: Algorithmic Efficiency
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism, current, state and/or programming:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The concept of a mental state is primarily the concept of a state of the person apt for bringing about a certain sort of behaviour.”
—David Malet Armstrong (b. 1926)
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)