Post #2154362
2026-04-28 07:05 UTC
@dpiponi I completely and wholeheartedly agree!
And I believe the same holds for higher layers of abstraction. The preaching of Python to the masses, for example, made everyone believe they are good programmers, if not even good computer scientists. The result is that current researchers write scientific computing codes, such as for simulations, that run, on modern hardware, in a time that is a factor of 10 larger than what was needed 20 years ago for the same task, on the hardware available at the time.
Replies (1)
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@raymaccarthy@mastodon.ie 2026-04-28 08:15
@paraw @dpiponi Partially true. The choice of MSDOS (a clone of obsolete CP/M) and the 8088 (a lower cost 8086) by IBM held back PCs (which existed for 5 years then) by nearly 10 years. The 8086 was only a pseudo 16 bit CPU, largely similar to the 8080 family with only 64K address blocks and ghastly segmented addressing of the 1M. BASIC shipping with IBM & later BBC Basic terrible. Minor nit: Edsger See also Hoare, Wirth and others. Due to MS, Google, Mozilla & Apple we have gone backwards.