DEV Community

Cover image for A Trendy Article From 2048

A Trendy Article From 2048

Jason C. McDonald on January 23, 2018

Thanks to a glitch in the time-space continuum (which apparently operates on C code, who knew?), I accessed the following article, written by some ...
Collapse
 
georgeoffley profile image
George Offley

Ha! Am I the only one who looked to see if Corundum was actually a thing?

Collapse
 
fnh profile image
Fabian Holzer

Great article, Jason!

When I look back to 1995, when I got my first computer, an old 80286, previously owned by my uncle, a machine barely younger than I was (with me being born in 1986) - I have a measure for three decades of technology. 16 MHz to something in the order of 4 cores with around 2 GHz each makes seven orders of magnitude (base 2, not base 10) on frequency and nine orders if you count the cores. If you just extrapolate that, you're not far off, with exchanging the GHz for THz (and the TB for PB). But - the crazy exponential curve has flattened, in the last 8 years there was not even a doubling (compare the first generation i7 with the latest; same amount of cores, 3.0 vs 4.3 GHz - not factoring in cache).

What I want to express: it seem's to me that the "free lunch period" provided by the exponential development of the hardware's capability might be over.

And while Moore's Law might let us down, Wirth's law ("software gets slower faster, than hardware gets faster") seems to hold. May I say, that to me this would constitute a bleak outlook indeed. Even more bleak than the prospect of Cobol running financial transactions in the year 211 CE.

I will still be more than half a decade away from retirement by then, but I certainly hope, that - all fads aside - the field of software development aims for and achieves more than just incremental steps on the status quo until then. By piling up masses of rubble by sheer force, you might get pyramids, but you get neither cathedrals nor skyscrapers.

But one thing still holds true, and I hope will do so at least until 2048, the most interesting time to be a developer is and up to this day has always been the present.

PS: On that one I lol'd really hard: "one solo open source project i found on github had a bunch of random thoughts about cheese scattered throughout it."

Collapse
 
codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

This article was actually quite satirical, as you probably detected. In reality, I've always doubted we'll get anywhere near to the specs that the "future author" referred to, because I agree with your assessment. The point I was making was basically that, no matter how fast we make computers, we'll probably always waste that speed and capacity by default.

In a way, the future I painted here is rather dystopic; it represents that pile of rubble that you mentioned in the Alan Kay reference. I actually speak in depth about this topic in my talk, The Cake Is A Lie (and I use that Kay quote in there, btw).

Collapse
 
fnh profile image
Fabian Holzer

I certainly didn't miss the satirical nature. Good satire, as well as dystopian or utopian texts, provides a great opportunity to use it for reflection.

I've skimmed the first of the four articles you wrote, on which you base your Cake talk. I liked it also and'll look into it a bit deeper the next days!

Collapse
 
twof profile image
Alex Reilly

hahahaha this is great. Dev.to comments sure have gotten sassy in the past 30 years.

Collapse
 
mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

"D'you suppose they might port Corundum to work with the Leaf programming language?"

Awesome, I guess I will finish the language someday! :)

Collapse
 
codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

I was hoping you would find that little Easter egg. ;)

Collapse
 
alephnaught2tog profile image
Max Cerrina • Edited

I can't believe you didn't cover the most recent version of C[^\w]{1,}!

Collapse
 
jjjjcccjjf profile image
endan

Real coders use vim

Collapse
 
jfrankcarr profile image
Frank Carr

Interesting...

But, what do the COBOL and VB6 job listings look like?

Collapse
 
twigman08 profile image
Chad Smith

Ha, now that's hilarious.
We were just joking around about a lot of this stuff at work the other day. About what the programmers of the future are going to say about what we used. Lol.