[quote author="dale116dot7"]
I don't think it's a case where the 1980's technology was better. I think it's actually more of a case where in the 1980's, hardware and software designers really understood bottlenecks and performance limitations, and how to get around them. At that time, parallel processing was how you pretty much had to do it. At the time, memory and processing were about synchronized in terms of speed. Now, memory is not significantly faster (except for the burst transfer modes which don't count in this application), but processing is between five and twenty times faster.
My feeling today is that software programmers have an attitude of making something look nice and shiny, make it look organized with this structured programming stuff, and let the hardware guys catch up. Also, I don't think that many software programmers really understand deep-down how memory timing and caching works. This approach might work on a PC, but for a hard real-time system (such as a real-time reverberator, or my day job, engine management system design), programmers must understand that the correct answer that's too late is a wrong answer.
-Dale[/quote]
This is so often true and reminds me of the wonderful piece of years back, "Real Programmers Don't Write Pascal", patterned after the best-seller Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. Available I see (ahh search engines be blessed!) here: http://www.desc.okayama-u.ac.jp/~jyam/Personal/PC/RPNWP.html
Some choice excerpts:
"My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000-line FORTRAN program, then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Programming in the world won't help you solve a problem like that - it takes actual talent. Some quick observations on Real Programmers and Structured Programming:
* Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTO's.
* Real Programmers can write five-page long DO loops without getting confused.
* Real Programmers like arithmetic IF statements - they make the code more interesting.
* Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if they can save 20 nanoseconds in the middle of a tight loop.
* Real Programmers don't need comments - the code is obvious.
...
OS/370 is a truly remarkable operating system. It's possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space (actually this is also true of UNIX), so alertness in the programming staff is encouraged.
...
No, the Real Programmer wants a ``you asked for it, you got it'' text editor - complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, and dangerous. TECO, to be precise.
...
It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission-line noise than readable text [4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does.
...
Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they were able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation - hitting ten kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
"
I love that last anecdote about Voyager :green:
Even Mark G., my friend and collaborator from time to time, now mostly writes compiled (C) code for low-bandwidth PIC uC applications. It's interesting how quickly that approach runs out of gas even for what seems at first glance to be very low-octane tasks. But yes it's easier to inspect and modify and maintain yada yada.
Oh well. It will be interesting to see what happens to Lexicon now that Harman (whose misspellings are proliferating of late and probably contributing to its deterioration) seem to be on the rocks. :sad: