Re: Air traffic control system in Java

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:23:58 -0800, Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:

> On 3/4/2011 12:18 PM, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
>> GUI applications
>> reached their peak about 10 years ago and now are in *relative* decline.
> 
> I am curious why you say?

Because it is so.

> Given that HTML5, the next generation
> of HTML is all about having a build-in GUI as part of the standard,
> and ability to play movies and all that GUI stuff, all using
> just HTML and Javascript.

Shudder...

> It seems to me that GUI is becoming more important (see that
> Ipad, Iphone, etc...) everything you see is GUI.

GUI becoming less important because of the applications running without
human intervention. These are new areas where computing is coming to. Do
you have a car? Guess how many programmed controllers a modern car has? Do
you know how many functions (applications) are they running simultaneously?
How many of them have a GUIs? And this is a relatively established area of
computing. The newer ones are coming, embedded, distributed, massively
parallel. Where you are going to get millions and millions of operators for
these countless applications? Forget GUI it will be locked in a niche as
numeric computations before.

The percentage of interactive visual applications will necessarily fall.
This value could be estimated from above [very optimistically] as:

   P / (N * r)

P = the human population (approximately constant, maybe, falling)
N = number of CPUs in use (grows exponentially, so far)
r = time sharing factor, number of independent tasks (applications) per CPU
(greater than 1, may drop, but insignificantly)

From the above follows that the percentage of GUI applications converges to
0!

This scenario is of course possible under the condition that the software
developing technology will mature to handle that computational power and
new application areas.

There is another scenario, that due to dropping quality of software, it
will not be possible to design and run necessary applications without human
intervention (and thus without your beloved GUIs). That will in turn cause
stagnation of the number of processors. At this point the cost of software
[the full cost] will start to grow exponentially: much demand, less supply.
Which would mean a collapse of the industry, or a technological
breakthrough (ditching C, Java, PHP and Co.).

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de