The state of computing
Posted on March 29, 2004
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 58 views |
When I write bad software you don’t get your web pages. When other people write bad software people can die, as Larry O’Brien notes in “Computers Suck”:
Today, during my 692nd hour SCUBA diving, my life was jeopardized by a computer malfunction. I was trying out a new piece of equipment, an air-integrated diving computer, that replaces a “conventional” dive computer (used to track safety relating to “the bends”) and two analog devices: the depth gauge and the pressure gauge that tells you how much air is left in the tank.
I whole-heartedly agree with his conclusion:
We are marking notches into clay tablets and wondering if innovation in writing is dead. Virtually the entire history of computers lies before us: we exist in a footnote between Alan Turing and God-Knows-Who. Today’s hardware is crap. Today’s software is crap. Today’s tools to build software are crap. Let’s change that.
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