Tuesday, August 02, 2005

A state of affairs

There was a lecture arranged at my work place. It was supposedly on Linux internals, but it digressed a lot, upto the the limit that there wasnt anything of Linux discussed. But the points the distinguished speaker made are worth pondering over.

1. Programming is meant to be clean & simple. It allows to be done in a manner that is human readable (meaning better readability). But most code that you see & this includes all the kernel code is highly unreadable. In effect it can be concluded that most programmers & that includes all the system programmers are bad bad programmers.

2. If you look at Linux kernel code, it is neither properly documented nor does it follow the modern OS programming approach. Its like walking through a slum, you have to keep looking here & there...

3. We started off from a 4Mhz processor & these days we have 3ghz ones. But the OSes running on them have become more lousy with time. And this is true if you look at how sadly Linux & Windows use a god damn 3gig processor.

4. Free Software, Open Source hasnt done that good as was expected. Reason, every Tom-Dick-Harry can contribute. The quality suffers, but this doesnt mean closed source did wonders. If you look at computer industry as a whole in the last 30 years of history there havent been ANY worthy innovations. Theres no "Theory of Relativity" counterpart out here.

5. After so many years of using computers we still type in commands to it. The time people spend in pressing the backspace key in a day is not negligible & so isnt the processing power wasted over redundant mouse movement.

6. We are wasting time & computing power with inefficient software. How fast be your processor, it still takes countable time to open office documents.
( I personally feel MS Office beats the pants out of every other counterpart. Its the only thing MS has made really really engineered.)

The speaker has 20 years of experience in the computer industry, is a scientist at IUCAA, teaches at CDAC & is the CTO of our company.His name is Dr Sunu Engineer.

Category [ _Tech_ ]

1 comment:

Sudeep said...

A diversion frm the post.. met Asit Desai on tekdi a few days back. He is flying to Purdue. Was asking 'bout u.. i recall u were in same class in AGC.