Guy Steele: Computers are Too Complex to Know it All
I guess to me the biggest change is that nowadays you can't possibly know everything that's going on in the computer. There are things that are absolutely out of your control because it's impossible to know everything about all the software. Back in the '7Os a computer had only 4,000 words of memory. It was possible to do a core dump and inspect every word to see if it was what you expected. It was reasonable to read the source listings of tine operating system and see how that worked. And I did that—I studied the disk routines and the card-reader routines and wrote variants of my own. I felt as if I understood how die entire IBM 1130 worked. Or at least as much as I cared to know. You just can't do that anymore.
Notes:
It was once possible to know all aspects of the computer, but the system has grown too large and complex for that now.
Folksonomies: programming computer science
Taxonomies:
/technology and computing/hardware/computer (0.748021)
/technology and computing/software (0.449905)
/technology and computing/hardware/computer components/disks (0.447018)
Keywords:
Guy Steele (0.993533 (neutral:0.000000)), biggest change (0.938671 (negative:-0.679485)), tine operating (0.881132 (positive:0.676854)), core dump (0.857175 (negative:-0.259900)), disk routines (0.855042 (neutral:0.000000)), card-reader routines (0.834864 (neutral:0.000000)), entire IBM (0.809893 (negative:-0.285059)), source listings (0.790363 (positive:0.676854)), Computers (0.266551 (neutral:0.000000)), aspects (0.265184 (neutral:0.000000)), variants (0.259889 (neutral:0.000000)), things (0.254892 (neutral:0.000000)), control (0.254279 (neutral:0.000000)), words (0.253938 (negative:-0.375915)), memory (0.253761 (negative:-0.375915)), software (0.253315 (neutral:0.000000))
Entities:
Guy Steele:Person (0.877550 (negative:-0.679485)), IBM:Company (0.422627 (negative:-0.285059)), operating system:FieldTerminology (0.398507 (positive:0.676854))
Concepts:
Computer (0.977355): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Operating system (0.784723): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Integrated circuit (0.740657): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Core dump (0.718279): dbpedia | freebase
Computer software (0.689212): dbpedia
Computer program (0.531312): dbpedia | freebase
Software engineering (0.517784): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
IBM (0.516701): website | dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago | crunchbase
Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
