Darren New schrieb:
> clipka wrote:
>> There are languages out there, for instance, that support "design by 
>> contract", which was first mentioned no more than 23 years ago.
> 
> Great. There's one language that supports it, and the compiler still 
> sucks. :-) Sure, there are a couple other languages, probably, but 
> nothing that you could point to a big company using. Nobody is betting 
> their corporation on the benefits provided by "design by contract" is 
> what I'm saying.
> 
> (I tried to get people to use Eiffel 15 years ago for a new project. 
> They went with Java.)

Then "Nice" may be something to try. It compiles to Java bytecode.

>> Aspect-oriented programming languages haven't been around for longer 
>> than 8 years.
> 
> Name a language besides LISP that I can use to write production-quality 
> code in that supports AOP?

Hey, could you have named a language to write production-quality /OOP/ 
code 8 years after the concept was first mentioned?

> I mean, we had 64-CPU boxes for our servers in 1992. We just ran more 
> than 64 processes on them independently. I'm not sure this isn't a 
> viable alternative for quite some time.

No, because the home user will not normally have 64 processes to run, 
but he'll still expect his software to run 4 times as fast on a quad 
core system.

Game developers have already pioneered this area, and I guess as 
multi-core systems get ever more common, whatever mechanisms and 
languages the game developers have come up with will enter mainstream 
languages. It may take some time, but it will happen. And we may be 
surprised what software can then benefit from multithreading once it 
becomes easier to express process interactions.

> I think software reliability and flexibility in the face of changing 
> requirements is a bigger motivator than taking advantage of multiple CPUs.

This is probably the case in business software, which is a different 
animal anyway, but software quality hasn't been playing a /too/ big role 
in consumer software, and the challenges there come as not much of a 
surprise. The multi-processing challenge /is/ a surprise to software 
developers, as a decade ago nobody would have thought that the increase 
in computing power would take /this/ route in consumer computers. So 
there's a growing computing power "vacuum" waiting to be filled. And it 
/will/ be filled.

But maybe I'm a bit biased by working on POV-Ray :-)

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