Jaron Lanier tells coders to start from scratch

Computer scientist Jaron Lanier believes that developers will never be able to create programs bigger than 30 million lines of code without abandoning a lot of accumulated assumptions about how computers work:

Here's the problem with computers: it's just so much work to think about programs that people treat the details of software as if they were acts of God. When you go to school and learn how to program, you are taught about an idea like a computer file as if it were some law of nature. But if you go back in history, files used to be controversial. The first version of the Macintosh before it was released didn't have files. Instead, they had the idea of a giant global soup of little tiny primitives like letters.

2004/02/23 · 0 COMMENTS · Link