Ma'am, Sir,
There is so much to sort through in life already and our work as programmers
of the world's computer programs is only one of the many interesting things
to do in life.
When a new programmer arrives on the scene the human soul inside the shell
of socio-economic-materialistic person must look deep (deeper than that)
within themselves and decide what is and is not art to them. Everyone sees
art in a different way much as Mr. Henry David Thorreau described us all as
'stepping to the beat of a different drummer'. Perhaps we should all just
wait and see where time and the future really takes each of us and just look
at all the different kinds of art along the way deciding each for ourselves.
Mr. Charles Moore in his brilliance set the world, especially Intel on a
path of excellence that is nearly unbridaled. Every single day all over the
earth many (more than that) computer hardware engineers work with a very
strong (stronger than that) sense of motivation, dedication and purpose.
Their hard work is what makes Mr. Moore's law a reality. If they were lazy,
the demise of computer programming could perhaps take place, but they are not
and for that I love them dearly.
Think of this: today, it is the 25th day of the month of March in the year
2005 and the fastest Dell PC in the catalog on my desk that was mailed to me
from Dell.com states that a 3.2GHZ CPU is the fastest machine sold by
Dell.com. Now think that is the year 2007, Moore's law states that we can
expect 6.4GHZ. Again, it is now 2009 and we are at 12.8GHZ. Keep going on
your own and discover like I did that every 20 years we add three zeros to
the cycles-per-second HERTZ measurement-number meaning that in the year 2025
3,200,000,000,000 will have replaced the 3,200,000,000 which is to say that
3,200GHZ will exist in the year 2025 and 3.2GHZ exists today in the year
2005. That means that in the year 2065 which will be three years away from
my 100th birthday since I was born in 1968, the fastest CPU on earth may very
well be 3,200,000,000,000,000,000 or 3,200,000,000GHZ which means that we
ancient programmers way back in the year 2005 will hardly be thought out or
remembered anymore than the ASSEMBLY language programmers of the 1960s are
thought of by C programmers or C++ programmers or Java programmers or C#
programmers or BASIC programmers today. Time changes everything. It is no
one's fault, it is simply the progress of human kind observed by us mere
mortal human beings. I like quoting movies to make points so I ask you to
remember the movie "THE LION KING" remember the line ..."The Circle of Life"
so it is for us too.
If Moore's Law holds true which is as likely as it is not likely for the
sake of history supporting Moore's original observations, consider then that
programming and the nature of programming or rather the art of programming
computers will also change. Already the nature of code has really changed
incredibly since the early days of Altair BASIC and Q-DOS. Back then very
few people worried about anything other than MACHINE or ASSEMBLY languages
because CPU speeds were very, very, very, very slow compared to today speeds.
Consider that an Intel 486/25mhz or 25,000,000 cycles per second existed in
about 1991 and that Intel released 286 and 386 slower machines than the 486
only years earlier. RAM was very expensive and was very limited and very
expensive at about $100 for a stick of good 8mb memory or perhaps a deal at
16mb for $129.99. Today, 512mb of RAM in one stick where four slots usually
exists only costs about $79.99 on average in a retail store like COMP-USA.
Programmers in the 1950s and 1960s before had to really work hard to do
anything. The most clever text-graphic-creating COBOL programmers were
looked up to as they printed very long banners on dot matrix printers for our
offices at work. I remember how it really was. FLOPPY DISKS were humongous
and very flimsy. Today, CD-RWs and DVD-RWs and SD/MMC has greatly changed
non-volatile data storage.
In 1970, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernigham produced the first C language
compiler while working at Bell Laboratories. Since then, religious-like
stances on the art of programming have introduced themselves as sects or
divisions amongst the world's programmers. It is as sad as the Muslim vs
Christian vs Hindu vs Judaism vs Buddhism warring on earth today. We all
share voltage or no-voltage states of mind should we not celebrate that? Or
should we be devoutly C or devoutly UNIX or devoutly BASIC or devoutly JAVA
or devoutly C-SHARP? We should respect each other's opinions and celebrate
each other's accomplishments and try with every fiber of our being to
forgive/overlook each other's shortcomings. A pat on the back is worth
$1,000,000,000,000.00, a trillion dollars, to a working-class man or woman on
earth. Remember that, Mr. and Mrs. Corporate Executive! Remember that Mr.
and Mrs. Admiral/General/Military Officers! Remember that Mr. and Mrs.
Elected Official/Judge. Remember to pat your folks on their backs. Speaking
of, my wife just called and made sure that I end this shortly and return to
pat her on her back for all she does for me and my children. See what I
mean...folks, we need each other.
So, before I go, given a CPU's speed constantly increases over time while
also becoming less expensive over time, volatile-storage RAM increases in
capacity and speed over time while also becoming less expensive over time,
and that non-volatile-storage EIDE/SCSI/CD-RW/DVD-RW/SD-MMC, etc. increases
in capacity and speed over time while also becoming less expensive over time,
it is clear that we, the computer-software-engineers, PROGRAMMERS, have only
good things to look forward to with regard to the ART OF PROGRAMMING as the
future unfolds...that is, if we do destroy our wonderful planet, EARTH, by
any means.
All that I have said has not even mentioned the issues of the day which are
TCP/IPv4/IPv6/HTTP/HTTPS, XML, HTML, XHTML, TXT, CSV, TSV, CHTML, FELICA,
WML, AES, HDML, ASCII, UNICODE, UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16LE, UTF-16LE, BMP, GIF,
JPEG, PNG, SVG, MP3, WAV, WMA, MPEG, MOV, WMV, ASPX, MMIT_ASPX, ASMX, ASCX,
C, H, CPP, DLL, JS, CS, VB, EXE, CE_EXE, DIRECTX, ACTIVEX, COM, OLE, SOAP,
WSDL, DISCO, UDDI, and on and on the list of important file types, standards,
technologies, acronyms goes on into time.
I believe that their is something preciously primitive about the acronym
BLIDSSS which is to say:
B oolean
L ong
I nteger
D ecimal
D ouble
S ingle
S hort
S tring
meaning that BLIDDSSS is a way to say that in the year 2065 when central
processing units or CPUs are going 1 million times faster than they are today
that those fast little brains will still be dealing with BLIDDSSS primitive
data types which by the say are defined by the Microsoft .NET Framework and
not by me.
I did purchase BLIDDSSS.com intending to illustrate what exactly I mean and
will do so to the best of my ability.
I have said what I came to say as honestly and intelligently as I can. I
rest in peace.
Thank you for your time and to all of the people who have written books or
helped me along the way I thank you all.
Respectfully,
SmartWebAgent
John Flaherty
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.smartwebagent.com