thoughts on programming
Apr. 29th, 2008 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI'm a bit bummed that I can't view my VRML worlds properly on my Puppy Linux machine. I've spent a couple of days trying everything I can think of, to no avail. It is no secret that I think Linux has become the major alternative now that Microsoft looks like it is about to go the way that the once arrogant and world-dominating IBM did. Microsoft's Vista has been a dismal marketplace failure. Many people attribute it to Vista's technical shortcomings, but I think Microsoft's deeply overdrawn account at the karma bank shouldn't be overlooked. They bring new meaning to the term "morally bankrupt". Few people trust them or their notoriously insecure operating systems.
So, installing Windows on a partition just so that I can use VRML -- something I'd been considering -- seems a bit silly and wasteful.
I sat down last night and wrote a long piece for myself on the state of computing in general and 3d in particular. I won't bore you with the details here, but one thing I stumbled across was the surprising realisation that a very large part the computing grief we endure is a result of the separation between source code and binary. One of the problems it causes is the way library code is constructed. If libraries were self-documenting then many of the problems of modern computing would simply evaporate. (If anybody is interested I'll enlarge on this.)
It also occurred to me that the whole free and open source software (FOSS) movement has been based on the idea that we must put up with the inconvenience of source code in order to retain freedom, but that is a mistake and is doomed to always fail. Most users, given the choice between convenience or freedom will choose convenience. The separation between source and binary is the major cause of loss of software freedom.
Compiled code brings about a number of other major problems too.
But, you might answer, programs must be compiled into machine readable code which is unreadable to humans in order to give us high performance. That's not necessarily true. FORTH is one of the fastest and most efficient languages ever designed and it always remains human readable -- even the code directly executed in silicon by one of the FORTH chips. FORTH runs at almost the speed of hand crafted assembler and its programs have absurdly small file sizes. The core language is just 4k and the central execution routine is a few bytes in size. Compare this with Java, which compiles to code unreadable by humans and is renowned for being sluggish and bloated. I'm not suggesting we all switch over to using FORTH, but it does show that our assumptions are not necessarily correct.
I've been thinking more and more about the 3d language I started designing some years ago... will I waste more years if I work on that? I already wasted years on VRML. The current crop of 3d games like World of Warcraft and the less violent 3d worlds like SecondLife are all built on Microsoft's operating systems. If Microsoft lose their footing then so do all those other things. A depressing thought.
So, installing Windows on a partition just so that I can use VRML -- something I'd been considering -- seems a bit silly and wasteful.
I sat down last night and wrote a long piece for myself on the state of computing in general and 3d in particular. I won't bore you with the details here, but one thing I stumbled across was the surprising realisation that a very large part the computing grief we endure is a result of the separation between source code and binary. One of the problems it causes is the way library code is constructed. If libraries were self-documenting then many of the problems of modern computing would simply evaporate. (If anybody is interested I'll enlarge on this.)
It also occurred to me that the whole free and open source software (FOSS) movement has been based on the idea that we must put up with the inconvenience of source code in order to retain freedom, but that is a mistake and is doomed to always fail. Most users, given the choice between convenience or freedom will choose convenience. The separation between source and binary is the major cause of loss of software freedom.
Compiled code brings about a number of other major problems too.
But, you might answer, programs must be compiled into machine readable code which is unreadable to humans in order to give us high performance. That's not necessarily true. FORTH is one of the fastest and most efficient languages ever designed and it always remains human readable -- even the code directly executed in silicon by one of the FORTH chips. FORTH runs at almost the speed of hand crafted assembler and its programs have absurdly small file sizes. The core language is just 4k and the central execution routine is a few bytes in size. Compare this with Java, which compiles to code unreadable by humans and is renowned for being sluggish and bloated. I'm not suggesting we all switch over to using FORTH, but it does show that our assumptions are not necessarily correct.
I've been thinking more and more about the 3d language I started designing some years ago... will I waste more years if I work on that? I already wasted years on VRML. The current crop of 3d games like World of Warcraft and the less violent 3d worlds like SecondLife are all built on Microsoft's operating systems. If Microsoft lose their footing then so do all those other things. A depressing thought.
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Date: 2008-05-07 01:06 am (UTC)I have found a really nice, free chm to html converter. I'll chase up the name. There are quite a few out there, but only one free one that I found worked well. I much prefer html. It doesn't need a special reader.
As I think I've mentioned here before, I've become addicted to Puppy Linux. It has shortcomings, but its small size and speed make up for it in my mind.
It is a long time since I used FORTH. Although it is beautiful and concise and embodies most of what an ideal computer language should be, it loses on one thing: humans don't think naturally in reverse polish notation. I've often thought that if the FORTH architecture could be made to run something as readable as Python then we'd really have a killer language.
Heheheh Yes. I felt a little guilty saying that FORTH was human readable, but I couldn't think of a better way of putting it. Real-time decompiling is a very good description of how it works. It is like the old BASIC programs that use tokens for keywords. When the program is listed the tokens are replaced by the words. That is what FORTH does too. And if we call one human-readable then I kinda felt the other was too, as there was little practical difference. (Tiny fib rationalised.)