Telepath John
Active Member
Hello,
I have worked in the computer industry since 1961. At that time most business information processing was done on unit record equipment.
I like using assembler programming languages. I have used FAP (FORTRAN Assembly Programming), BAL (Basic Assembler Language), and Flat Assembler more recently. There are not popular languages because of the user interface for the programmer. My idea is that using a browser interface would make this deep level of coding more practical.
I was doing programming in C a few years ago when I realized that the GNU C compiler had been compromised to prevent that dreaded Divide by Zero error. The C language will not allow a value to be reduced to zero to prevent that error. However if you want to read values from a file, the offset value for the first file record is Zero. So you need to write extra code to read file records. I stopped using C at that point.
The computers we use today are not stable. The fatal divide by zero error is just one example. I am not informed about the chips we use in smart phones. Maybe that are designed better. Most of my experience has been in developing business software applications. The computers we use for that application are the ones we need to better engineer.
My understanding is that Run Time Software Libraries would make programing more efficient. There would be no need to import libraries, or put duplicate code into various libraries, for very common routines like converting an ASCII character to a binary value. I once worked with a software language called DBL which allowed a run time library. No one seems to know how to build that kind of library for today's popular languages.
The other technique I liked to use was memory resident file systems. In Linux you can make some files memory resident. The record locking for updates would be memory pages. The size of all fixed records would be such that they fit into a page of memory.
I realize that current day data base systems are far removed from these techniques. Yet we cling to them as if what we are doing is actually good technology. It is not in my view.
I suspect we are 20-30 years away from making stable hardware and reasonably good software products. I would like to influence that speculation so that the time frame can be reduced to 10-20 years. The companies which dominate this industry are not interested in change. Yet change to stability and productivity can not be prevented indefinitely.
I post this thread in this forum because I believe the autistic person can think in more elevated ways. My hope is that this belief can be validated.
John
I have worked in the computer industry since 1961. At that time most business information processing was done on unit record equipment.
I like using assembler programming languages. I have used FAP (FORTRAN Assembly Programming), BAL (Basic Assembler Language), and Flat Assembler more recently. There are not popular languages because of the user interface for the programmer. My idea is that using a browser interface would make this deep level of coding more practical.
I was doing programming in C a few years ago when I realized that the GNU C compiler had been compromised to prevent that dreaded Divide by Zero error. The C language will not allow a value to be reduced to zero to prevent that error. However if you want to read values from a file, the offset value for the first file record is Zero. So you need to write extra code to read file records. I stopped using C at that point.
The computers we use today are not stable. The fatal divide by zero error is just one example. I am not informed about the chips we use in smart phones. Maybe that are designed better. Most of my experience has been in developing business software applications. The computers we use for that application are the ones we need to better engineer.
My understanding is that Run Time Software Libraries would make programing more efficient. There would be no need to import libraries, or put duplicate code into various libraries, for very common routines like converting an ASCII character to a binary value. I once worked with a software language called DBL which allowed a run time library. No one seems to know how to build that kind of library for today's popular languages.
The other technique I liked to use was memory resident file systems. In Linux you can make some files memory resident. The record locking for updates would be memory pages. The size of all fixed records would be such that they fit into a page of memory.
I realize that current day data base systems are far removed from these techniques. Yet we cling to them as if what we are doing is actually good technology. It is not in my view.
I suspect we are 20-30 years away from making stable hardware and reasonably good software products. I would like to influence that speculation so that the time frame can be reduced to 10-20 years. The companies which dominate this industry are not interested in change. Yet change to stability and productivity can not be prevented indefinitely.
I post this thread in this forum because I believe the autistic person can think in more elevated ways. My hope is that this belief can be validated.
John