[rescue] Mainframe on eBay

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 22 Sep 2005, Patrick Giagnocavo 717-201-3366 wrote:

> Can I just point out that TCL, while interpreted, does not seem to
> overall blow chunks as badly?  And LISP can be quite fast, even when
> interpreted ... ISTR criticism of LISP when it needed 8MB of RAM to
> run well; and now the help viewer under Windows probably takes 8MB.

It could be that OOP systems and interpreters just magnify each other's
bloat.  There have been really large, efficient systems written in both
TCL and Lisp.

>> It is.  Unfortunately, until we finally hit The Final Brick Wall,
>> people
>
> There will be no Final Brick Wall because Intel keeps making
> performance and process improvements ...

There's an absolute limitation on the minimum size of a gate.  That is
the Final Brick Wall.  At that point, either software optimization,
parallelism, chip reduction (to combat heat production), or a new
computational paradigm (like quantum computing or something) is the only
way to increase performance.

> I think that secretly the hardware makers love to see us churning out
> "UML hackers" and "HTML programmers" .

There's nothing secret about it.  Dell and HP don't hate that each new
version of Windows needs a brand new PC to run effectively.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "When we are young, wandering the face of the
Elgin, TX          (    earth, wondering what our dreams might be worth,
USA                 )   learning that we're only immortal--for a limited
                    (    time."                              --Neil Peart