From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,60e2922351e0e780 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-11-02 05:49:25 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!elnk-pas-nf1!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net.POSTED!d9c68f36!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3FA50B5D.9040504@noplace.com> From: Marin David Condic User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 (OEM-HPQ-PRS1C03) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Software vs Hardware productivity (was: Re: Clause "with and use") References: <3FA2CDCB.500F4AF0@fakeaddress.nil> <3FA3B412.AF3BEB96@fakeaddress.nil> <3FA50083.10709@noplace.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2003 13:49:25 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.165.24.156 X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net X-Trace: newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net 1067780965 209.165.24.156 (Sun, 02 Nov 2003 08:49:25 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2003 08:49:25 EST Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1922 Date: 2003-11-02T13:49:25+00:00 List-Id: Well, that's just a matter of "features" if you will. Building a larger "device" - whatever that device may be - is always going to be more time consuming than building a smaller one. Microprocessors have become bigger and that probably means they take more time to design than smaller ones. But if you say "Last month, there was a chip with 100_000 transistors on it and this month the same team built one with 1_000_000 transistors on it..." does that make the design team 10 times more "productive"? Not necessarily. Did they have to design each of those transistors individually, or did they just redesign *one* transistor to make it smaller, then wire up ten times as many of them into a bigger device? To be fair, a parallel might be that you write a subroutine that is called in a loop 100_000 times and this is as much work as it can do in the alloted time span. Then you do some redesign of the subroutine to chop out some instructions and suddenly, you can execute it 1_000_000 times in the same time span. Or your program had an array that held 100_000 elements and, because you got a bigger box, you tweaked a constant and in a cocaine heartbeat you got 1_000_000 elements into the array. Were you suddenly 10x more productive than the first time? Probably not. There just is no fair comparison of software design to hardware design if you're looking at the amount of features on a chip versus the amount of features in a software system. The chip designer can *design* one feature and duplicate it a million times - creating a million features. The software designer has to design each individual feature - otherwise its just a generic or a subroutine - which isn't counted the same way as a NAND gate or a barrel shifter or an adder or a memory cell is in the silicon world. Actually, I suspect that if software designers could take credit for "features" in the same way that hardware designers do, we'd end up showing similar, if not way more productivity gains. When I pop a window up on a screen, can I take credit for the number of pixels I've just disturbed? That's no different than a memory chip designer taking credit for the number of memory cells he created in his design. Programs I build years ago used to occupy less than 64k of memory and because of improvements in technology, etc., I can now build a program that exceeds a megabyte without hardly breaking a sweat. Isn't that more "productive" in the same sort of units a hardware designer might get measured? MDC Stephane Richard wrote: > > I hear ya. If you take that to the programming world, the easier you want > an application to be for it's user the more design (and cosequently > programming) it needs. Plain and simple. :-) > -- ====================================================================== Marin David Condic I work for: http://www.belcan.com/ My project is: http://www.jsf.mil/NSFrames.htm Send Replies To: m o d c @ a m o g c n i c . r "So if I understand 'The Matrix Reloaded' correctly, the Matrix is basically a Microsoft operating system - it runs for a while and then crashes and reboots. By design, no less. Neo is just a memory leak that's too hard to fix, so they left him in... The users don't complain because they're packed in slush and kept sedated" -- Marin D. Condic ======================================================================