[LINK] 10 tech laws that define our world

[Marghanita da Cruz]

Glen Turner wrote:
>> 9. Wirth's Law
>>
>> Ever wondered why your seventy-three-core monster PC isn't noticeably faster at everyday tasks
> 
> Actually, Amdahl's Law is more to the point: Data requiring locking must
> be accessed sequentially and can't gain from the speedup of more CPU
> cores. And Amdahl's Argument: The amount of locked data increases with
> the number of CPU cores. Therefore additional CPUs cores have falling
> marginal throughput.
> 

I wonder if would have helped if Pascal(1) and structured programming had
caught on?

Bright eyed and bushy tailed out of University, I proposed and undertook a
real world project in Pascal, as an alternative to FORTRAN on a Cyber 76,
on a CPM(2) computer in 1982. The problem was a lack of libraries. Went
back to Fortran 77 with hard coded memory management.

A year or so later, when I was tearing my hair out trying to find the bug
in a computer program that was producing erratic results, a consultant was
brought in to help me out, who identified the cause of the program as a bug
in the compiler.

In 1996, I did a course in Java to discover what Object Orientated
Programming was all about. During the course, thanks to my earlier
experience, I identified a bug in the Java compiler.

Recently, I heard about Object Oriented Fortran(3).

I don't think the problem is the software code, it is that it is being
interpreted, rather than being compiled.

Then there is Marghanita's Law: Memory (not disk storage) is expensive and
most computers have lots of CPU but not enough memory.

Marghanita
Notes:
1.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_%28programming_language%29>
2.CPM was obliterated by the IBM PC/MSDOS juggernaut
3.<http://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/Object-oriented+programming>
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
Ramin Communications (Sydney)
Website: http://ramin.com.au
Phone:(+612) 0414-869202