[soupboy]

Looking at all the amazing work done regarding the DCPU and the article yesterday on Instagram's technology stack made me realize just how far we've advanced. With the tools that we have available now, it is possible to do things in a few days that it took people years if not decades to achieve.

[unreal37]

"it is now possible to do things in a few days that took people ... decades to achieve".

Let's not get too excited here. Name one thing that can be done in days that used to take decades.

[lolcraft]

The first Fortran compiler's creation took 18 person-years. Now there are C compilers which were written from scratch in person-weeks, like TCC.

[mbrubeck]

But the first C compilers were written four decades ago by a couple of people in a matter of months. And they were not just writing the compilers but also designing the language at the same time.

"When Steve Johnson visited the University of Waterloo on sabbatical in 1972, he brought B with him. It became popular on the Honeywell machines there, and later spawned Eh and Zed (the Canadian answers to `what follows B?'). When Johnson returned to Bell Labs in 1973, he was disconcerted to find that the language whose seeds he brought to Canada had evolved back home; even his own yacc program had been rewritten in C, by Alan Snyder."

-- Dennis Ritchie, who wrote the first C compiler. http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html

[hwh]

Well, but those 18 person-years did their part to allow those person-weeks. That is: I agree, technology got far. But there's a second phenomenon involved: human knowledge. Technology steps happen in generations, often restarting from scratch. Knowledge steps on the other hand most come incremental (well, with some losses here and there). We're standing on the shoulders of giants.

[KC8ZKF]

Calculate pi to 700 decimal places.

[Aloisius]

The implementation that calculates pi took the same amount of time to build 30 years ago as it did today.

The discussion is about how much effort it is for people to implement things, not computers to run them.

[NickPollard]

Copying the entire contents of a large library of books.

[rmc]

The Singularity is near.