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by bwarp 5218 days ago
I was the proud owner of an ARM copro [1] many years ago (I still have the Master it was plugged into) and the first Acorn RISC machine (an A310 with 512k RAM if I remember correctly).

They were and still are extremely powerful and productive machines.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro_expansion_unit#ARM_Ev...
1 comments
gaius 5218 days ago
Returning to your original post,

We really are building things with too deep abstraction hierarchies causing knowledge to be divided

Abstraction is necessary, true, but it's not clear to me what the abstraction-level we have now really gets us. In other words, say we had a BBC micro with a 2Ghz 6502 in it. What productive computing tasks that we do now could it not do? Or let's imagine an Atari ST with a 2Ghz 68000, to get us a little more memory. What could it not do, that we need to do now? I'm struggling to think of anything.

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bwarp 5218 days ago
It doesn't get us anything at all other than a fucking huge rabbit hole to stare down every time you do anything. Lets look at a pretty naff case for .Net CLR on x86 for windows workflow:

application -> xaml -> framework -> server -> container -> c# -> cil -> bytecode -> x86 instructions -> microcode.

Now forth on a 68000:

Forth screen -> 68k instructions

To be honest, for what I consider to be life and death stuff, a 10MHz 68000 is good enough (I have one in my TI92 calculator).

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william42 5218 days ago
The main thing is that you'd need a new set of abstractions for security, and then you'd need to implement HTML5 on it anyways to do all the things we can do on a computer now.
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gaius 5218 days ago
to do all the things we can do on a computer now

Such as what? 99% of websites are a) screens where you enter something into predefined fields, to be stored in a database and/or b) screens that format nicely for display things that you or other people have previously entered. They were doing that in the 1970s. Only the buzzwords change.

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bwarp 5218 days ago
HTML5 is a piss poor evolutionary abstraction of what was effectively SGML and scripting carnage.

If you could start again, would you really end up with HTML5?

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