On Wednesday, 25 December 2024 at 01:45:18 UTC, Jo Blow wrote:
I think the real problem is that we've been building on systems
that were build on very primitive ideas and so it's a
constantly piling on of ad-hoc changes that may or may not
evolve into something more and then a constant need to maintain
them.
Yes. That's how evolution works.
Ideally if, say, we could just create a new system from the
ground up(including hardware) with all the "learned lessons" we
would get systems that would be far more efficient and
"complex". It is because we can, as a species, handle the
complexity more. But what we really have is having to work with
essentially a primitive system with many layers upon layers of
improvements to give it the features and expressiveness we
really want from realizing there are better ways.
But I think this is unavoidable.
Take a look at the human genom, it contains everything from frogs
and fish to apes until the "higher" functions like consciousness
are build upon them. Evolution never invents everything new from
scratch but only applies small changes and test if they survive.
The issue is that the cost to truly start fresh is too much to
go back and "do things right" with the lessons learned. So we
are stuck with the flaws of the past that has become part of
our "DNA". [This is true of all things because it is evolution
at work]
It's not only the cost to start new from scratch, it's the
problem that everything has to become battle-tested again, which
takes ages.
This is why things like printf are still in use.
