[FoRK] Armor-piercing silver bullets

[Luis Villa]

So what's their secret sauce?

Luis

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 12:32 AM, Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> wrote:
>
>  Fred Brooks famously claimed in a 1986 paper [1] that there are "no
>  [more] silver bullets" in advancing software technology, i.e. no more
>  innovations to be had which would increase programmer productivity by
>  more than twofold in a matter of two years.  In making this
>  pronouncement he was addressing improvements that would in some way
>  reduce "essential complexity" --- and noted that by reducing
>  "accidental complexity" we might see improvements on the order of a
>  tenfold increase over a decade.
>
>  There are a number of folks that appear to think that maybe Brooks was
>  wrong.  From among these folks we see efforts such as Paul Graham's
>  Arc, which appears to be tackling at least the accidental complexity
>  part of things, by embedding an implicit processing model (based on
>  continuations, never mind that this fundamentally breaks the Web and
>  in effect creates just another monolithic "software jail" in which our
>  data may be incarcerated) into a web application server.
>
>  More interesting, though, is the recent STEPS effort [2] involving
>  Alan Kay and friends at the Viewpoints Research Institute. [3]  (Nb.,
>  various folks including myself have mentioned the constituent research
>  projects of this umbrella project at various points on this list.)
>  Their project is quite a bit more ambitious, hoping to "reduce the
>  amount of code needed to make systems by a factor of 100, 1000, 10000,
>  or more."  (Yes, you read that correctly.)  And despite this ambitious
>  and admittedly somewhat scattershot research effort's relatively short
>  history to date --- it's just over a year old --- they're
>  demonstrating some impressive achievements:
>
>    - a meta-compiler / language toolkit (OMeta) written in about 100
>  lines of itself
>    - a runtime core including the language toolkit in about 1000 lines
>    - usable implementations of TCP and IP totaling less than 200 lines
>  of code
>    - a significant, useful subset of Cairo (realtime next-gen
>  PostScript) in less than 500 lines
>    - high-performing Javascript in 170 lines of code
>    - Prolog, 90 lines
>    - vector graphics toolkit, 450 lines of code
>    - Smalltalk, 200 lines
>    - Logo, 50 lines
>
>  And so on.  Note that these do not comprise a single usable system as
>  yet;  this is a research project consisting of numerous discrete and
>  independent projects.  One might expect line counts for individual
>  subsystems, language implementations, and so on to go up and the
>  system evolves and merges into a single artifact --- if it ever does
>  --- but one might also expect downward line-count minimizing pressure
>  as more common code is refactored and abstracted out.
>
>
>  Interesting stuff...
>
>  jb
>
>  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet
>  [2] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/steps_TR-2007-008.pdf
>  [3] http://www.vpri.org/
>
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