[TUHS] Future Languages (was Pascal not Favorite...)

[Bakul Shah]

> On Sep 1, 2017, at 11:15 AM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
> 
> 

> I may just be a grumpy old fart, but I think programming languages today are holding us back.   Nearly all of them...

I think the problem is much wider than just programming languages.

Most of our PLs, programs & tools are basically for single machine things. Our compilers, linkers, debuggers can only handle this case well. With a few exceptions.

This is not a good fit for a major class of applications today: service software. This is typically composed of a number of loosely coupled programs running on a set of networked machines. Managing this is done in a very ad-hoc & complicated manner (e.g. kubernetes). A service is implemented with essentially a distributed program but our tools don’t make it easy to compose or debug such programs. Things like dockers, containers, jails are complicated ways of dealing with problems we run into re: security, fault isolation, resiliency, scalability etc.

At the other extreme, dealing with GPUs or specialized processors with zillion cores, each with a small amount of memory etc. is also painful and ad-hoc.

In this context even if you prove a single component to be bug free, how can you have confidence in the whole system? It is well-nigh impossible to test all the gazillion ways a system can fail on a small scale or large (e.g. a java based component ran out of file descriptor or a packet gets misrouted or firewall rules are not quite right). Moving to something like Cloud would be an improvement over docker & VMs but that still leaves open the composition aspect.

Now likely there isn't a single silver bullet for all of this but our present systems are far more complicated than they need to be.

> On Sep 1, 2017, at 11:15 AM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> "Toby Thain:  We will never reach a point where programming language evolution stops, imho."
> 
> I may just be a grumpy old fart, but I think programming languages today are holding us back.   Nearly all of them...
> 
> I'm currently working for a hardware company (Wave Computing).   We are building a chip with 16K 8-bit processors on it, and have plans to build systems with up to 1/4 million processors from these chips.
> 
> Nevertheless, most programs today are still written pretty much like they were 25 years ago.   And they are, for the most part, based on threads where the programming task is to set out a number of steps:  do this, do that, do something else, test this and if true do this, ...      A single serial thread.  Things like multicore CPUs are a desperate attempt to preserve this model while the hardware world has blown past us.
> 
> Recall that parallelism is the natural state of hardware.  It takes effort to make things work sequentially.  In the old days, when hardware and software used pretty much the same model, many if not most of the hardware innovations came from first being done in software, and then moved into hardware -- index registers, floating point, caches, etc. etc.    That process has effectively stopped.  The single thread model simply no longer fits the sweet spot of today's hardware technology.
> 
> Just to underscore how far hardware has advanced:  If cars had become as much cheaper and faster as computers from 1970 to today, we could buy 1000 Tesla Model S's for a penny and they would go 0-60,000 mph!   A petabyte of data, if punched onto punch cards, would make a card deck whose height would be 6 times the distance to the moon.   If the recent estimate of the number of bytes of data produced by the human race every day (2.5 quintillion bytes) is correct, when punched up that card deck would be 9 times the distance to the sun.
> 
> I'm not saying that there isn't a place for languages like GO and Python.  Most people will continue to think serially and design things that way.  But when it comes to implementing these designs, the current "systems" languages are left at the starting gate.   In the same way that we invented abstraction methods like functions and processes for the old computers, we need to invent newer abstraction methods that go far beyond co-routines and threads and message passing.  If we get bogged down in telling tens of thousands of processors "do this, do that" we will perish long before our program works.  Of particular relevance is the role that abstractions play in debugging --they partition the job into pieces with known interfaces and behavior that can be tested in isolation before being assembled into complete systems.
> 
> Yes, I have some ideas (and not much time to work on them...) but, even if I had a perfect solution available today, I suspect it would take decades before it caught on.   In order to accept a solution, you first have to believe there is a problem...
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Toby Thain" <toby at telegraphics.com.au>
> 
> 
> We will never reach a point where programming language evolution stops,
> imho.
> 
> --T
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170904/36212d03/attachment.html>