[angersock]

Ah, thank you for the elaboration--I actually agree on several of your points now that you've provided additional context. :)

3D programming is not overly complex; it maps straight to its problem domain in most cases, along with some trivia about the underlying hardware. It's only as we've tried to embrace more general computational models that things've gotten more complicated--IrisGL/OpenGL 1.x were fairly clean conceptually, and not hard to work with.

I disagree too with your statement about hardware--it's similar to saying that airplanes have gone nowhere in 100 years: only true if you discount the massive improvements in engineering and functionality. Modern CPUs do a great deal more with virtual memory, SIMD instructions, and whatnot than old chips. New chips like the Propeller or Mill have some new tricks as well.

(Now, whether or not fundamental architectures are better or worse than, say, old machines from Burroughs et al in the 60s/70s is a different matter altogether....)

[zackmorris]

Ya I actually really miss OpenGL 1.x as well, as kind of a minimal environment needed to do projections. Something has been lost with shaders. For example, limitations on program size has been a real burden for me, and strikes me as not being general computation. My iPad 1 can only read like 4 source pixels at a time, making blurs very difficult while they are comparatively easy with handwritten blitters. Hopefully WebGL will nudge the spec back towards simpler times.

I kind of look at hardware today like the internal combustion engine. Great strides have been made to speed up single threaded processing, and it is truly remarkable that we run 3 GHz chips without even thinking about it, while most other electronics have seen very little improvement except to go from vacuum tubes to transistors. But if I had a billion transistors to work with, it would be kind of like going to electric motors and the chip I came up with would look nothing like an Intel Core i7. It would be more like an FPGA, with 10,000 or 100,000 simple cores and no caching or anything like that. So it would be abysmal at running an operating system (basically taking us back to the early 90s) but would be faster than any video card today for embarrassing parallel computation like image processing or search (kind of like the bitcoin ASICs but general purpose).