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From: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The CPU with 3 brains---486 compatibility with 8008
Message-ID: <6706@uceng.UC.EDU>
Date: 13 Nov 90 17:57:53 GMT
References: <42737@mips.mips.COM> <1990Nov4.014901.23819@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Nov6.223738.13265@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <9333@b11.ingr.com> <PCG.90Nov10145452@odin.cs.aber.ac.uk> <1106@banyan.UUCP>
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In article <1106@banyan.UUCP> gil@banyan.com writes:
>Any simple, elegant system will quickly become a large, sticky mess of
>poorly designed, redundant features when it is brought into widespread
>industrial use. It's the nature of the beast. If you want simpler,
>more elegant systems you'll need a market that makes its purchasing
>decisions based on simplicty and elegance and NOT on gross features.

If the people who make up that market had "simple and elegant" problems
to solve, no doubt they would be pleased with software that was
similarly "simple and elegant". The market consists of people who are
in business to make a profit. They base their purchasing decisions
on what their experience shows to yield the largest profit.
If they are making the wrong decision, then someone should be able
to go into business in competition with them, and prevail. 

Simplicity and elegance occur primarily in textbooks. The real world
has enormously complex problems to solve, under severe time constraints.
The market can't afford to ignore reality just to satisfy the aesthetic
sense of a cloistered, lazy programmer ("lazy" is not a pejorative term;
nobody wants to work harder than necessary, else we wouldn't demand
salaries). To sell into a real market, one must roll up one's sleeves 
and do a lot of real, detailed, and tedious work.

Experience has shown repeatedly that "simple" and "elegant" quickly 
become synonymous with "incapable". Look at the C language. It was 
designed initially to be small, but it is uncompetitive for most real 
problem-solving until you add hundreds of functions in libraries. C
can't stay "small" in practice and survive, else it would have. C
survives because it provides a set of base concepts to begin with,
an effective mechanism for expansion, and the ability for the customer
to select the expansion (s)he wants. In practice, the farther
this expansion goes, the more potentially valuable the system becomes.
The limiting factor is the programmer's ability to manage complexity.
 

--
Dan Mocsny				Snail:
Internet: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu	Dept. of Chemical Engng. M.L. 171
	  dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu		University of Cincinnati
513/751-6824 (home) 513/556-2007 (lab)	Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0171