[Sigia-l] Findability

[Karl Fast]

> Some argue that software development has gotten worse and worse over
> the years as developers more and more rely on processor power to
> compensate for sloppy and re-used code. 

I don't think it's sloppy or lazy. 

But let me let someone much smarter than me make the case. I like
the way Paul Graham puts it. There's good waste and there is bad
waste. 

This is from his essay, "The Hundred Year Language." Graham is
talking about designing programming languages, but even if you're
not much of a programmer it's worth reading.

  http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

  As technologies improve, each generation can do things that the
  previous generation would have considered wasteful. People thirty
  years ago would be astonished at how casually we make long
  distance phone calls. People a hundred years ago would be even
  more astonished that a package would one day travel from Boston to
  New York via Memphis.

  I can already tell you what's going to happen to all those extra
  cycles that faster hardware is going to give us in the next
  hundred years. They're nearly all going to be wasted.

  I learned to program when computer power was scarce. I can
  remember taking all the spaces out of my Basic programs so they
  would fit into the memory of a 4K TRS-80. The thought of all this
  stupendously inefficient software burning up cycles doing the same
  thing over and over seems kind of gross to me. But I think my
  intuitions here are wrong. I'm like someone who grew up poor, and
  can't bear to spend money even for something important, like going
  to the doctor.

  Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example,
  would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would
  never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because
  they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans
  look more masculine.) But not all waste is bad. Now that we have
  the infrastructure to support it, counting the minutes of your
  long-distance calls starts to seem niggling. If you have the
  resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one
  kind of thing, no matter where the other person is.

  There's good waste, and bad waste. I'm interested in good waste--
  the kind where, by spending more, we can get simpler designs. How
  will we take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that
  we'll get from new, faster hardware?


I think the good/bad waste idea is quite relevant to IA.
  

--karl