On Tuesday 13 August 2002 16:48, Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 04:12:14PM -0300, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> > [Jaron Lanier (sorry about the spelling!) and software limits]
>
> I had read this before, and skimmed it again, and didn't see where he
> made this claim.  Could you point it out to me?  The closest thing
> that I saw was that after 30 years, Unix (Linux, MacOS X) is again
> the Next Big Thing.  However, he attributes this to bad design rather
> than bumping up against intrinsic limits.

That was how I read the beginning of page 11:
---
  If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As
  processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software
  becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all
  available resources. Now I know I'm not being entirely fair here. We
  have better speech recognition and language translation than we used
  to, for example, and we are learning to run larger data bases and
  networks. But our core techniques and technologies for software simply
  haven't kept up with hardware. (Just as some newborn race of
  superintelligent robots are about to consume all humanity, our dear
  old species will likely to be saved by a Windows crash. The poor
  robots will linger pathetically, begging us to reboot them, even
  though they'll know it would do no good.)
---

He is 100% right, of course, and then goes on to talk about the 
"brittleness" problem in software.

What I don't agree with is that these are natural features of software, 
but only that they are the reflection of the Von Neumann architecture 
(where every single transistor and machine cycle "counts") on our 
current programming style and languages. I know he tried hard to create 
a different style and failed. Other people have also failed. But his 
conclusions from this are no more sound than some very observant person 
deciding in 1902 that the airplane was impossible.

-- Jecel