Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!emory!att!pacbell.com!pacbell!osc!jgk From: jgk@osc.COM (Joe Keane) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Raw power and user interfaces (was Re: Sun's Competitive Strategy) Summary: Current systems are complicated due to cheap memory. Keywords: software complexity Message-ID: <4085@osc.COM> Date: 13 Dec 90 22:43:57 GMT References: <1635@unix386.Convergent.COM> <1990Dec2.014554.3491@Neon.Stanford.EDU> <2760@cirrusl.UUCP> <1990Dec07.194407.29083@digibd.com> Reply-To: jgk@osc.COM (Joe Keane) Organization: Versant Object Technology, Menlo Park, CA Lines: 12 Don't be fooled, it doesn't take a lot of CPU speed or memory to have a good user interface. The problem is that since more power is available, developers will always trade it off for easier development and a longer feature list. Some of the things that are done today would make PDP-11 programmers quite sick. Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view. One view is that since we have so much CPU power and memory we shouldn't worry about using a lot of it, and we shouldn't be applying values from ten years ago. An alternate view, which i tend to agree with, is that this carelessness leads to overly complicated designs and systems which are harder, not easier, to debug and maintain. There are lots of new software paradigms, but what many of them translate to is that we should add more and more to our software in order to get the same thing done more easily.