Re: [OT] Gibson's vision of computer languajes

[Adrian Hoe <byhoe@greenlime.com>]

Jano wrote:
> 
> I'm pretty sure many of us know Steven Gibson. Today I've tested a
> freeware from him. In the instructions page he made these statements:
> 
> "All of my programs are so small and so fast because I write only in the
> one, true, computer language: Assembly Language. All other languages
> reduce to assembly language, but they lose a lot in the translation.
> (Judge for yourself.)"


Well, he says his programs are small, doesn't he? I agree that assembly
language becomes handy for certain programming purpose that requires
speed and no other programming languages on earth can beat assembly.
Assembly becomes a huge monster if the program is huge. Ask Steven to
write an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software, which contains
more than 250K function points. The task will be beyond Steven's
ability, but doesn't mean that is impossible.

The speed of execution may become irrelevent, if not today, at least 15
years later when 30GHz microprocessors (as predicted by Intel's Craig
Barrett) will be available.

An ERP software written in Ada can parse 50 complex business rules and
extract information (based on 50 business rules) from 6TB database in
just 3 minutes. Running on a 1.5GHz P4 workstation and a Sun Blade 1000
(dual CPUs) DB server.

At least 3 minutes are satisfactory for our clients. :)
-- 
                                       -- Adrian Hoe
                                       -- http://adrianhoe.com