They said it couldn’t be done, and he did it

The post on Dennis Ritchie by Herb Sutter is wonderful:

Before C, there was far more hardware diversity than we see in the industry today. Computers proudly sported not just deliciously different and offbeat instruction sets, but varied wildly in almost everything, right down to even things as fundamental as character bit widths (8 bits per byte doesn’t suit you? how about 9? or 7? or how about sometimes 6 and sometimes 12?) and memory addressing (don’t like 16-bit pointers? how about 18-bit pointers, and oh by the way those aren’t pointers to bytes, they’re pointers to words?).

There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to compete with custom code written for just that hardware. Fortran did okay for array-oriented number-crunching code, but nobody could do it for general-purpose code such as what you’d use to build just about anything down to, oh, say, an operating system.

So this young upstart whippersnapper comes along and decides to try to specify a language that will let people write programs that are: (a) high-level, with structures and functions; (b) portable to just about any kind of hardware; and (c) efficient on that hardware so that they’re competitive with handcrafted nonportable custom assembler code on that hardware. A high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language.

How silly. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done.

C is a poster child for why it’s essential to keep those people who know a thing can’t be done from bothering the people who are doing it. (And keep them out of the way while the same inventors, being anything but lazy and always in search of new problems to conquer, go on to use the world’s first portable and efficient programming language to build the world’s first portable operating system, not knowing that was impossible too.)

Thanks, Dennis.

Toolstrapping is everywhere - can you see it?

Jacques Mattheij introduces an evocative term: toolstrapping: "Whatever tool you are building, you need that tool to build the tool."

One of the reasons behind the continuing success of C seems to be that, by virtue of it being the standard programming language, there's no toolstrapping involved in using C (because it's already been done for you).

In the world of Scheme, we have the phenomenon that most Scheme implementations are written in Scheme, eternally perpetrating Scheme's sillier parts.

And people who say that plain text is somehow natural or native to computing simply ignore the toolstrapping involved in plain text: your quaint Unix is already toolstrapped up the wazoo for handling plain text.

The browser is a chance to raise the toolstrap bar: from plain text to hypermedia. The window of opportunity closes once we're able to run Emacs in X11 in the browser.

It's called programming

People get annoyed when they must write two lines of code instead of one, but I don't. It's called programming. – Rob Pike

How to beat the CAP theorem

Nathan Marz has an interesting proposal, How to beat the CAP theorem, that should resonate with all you FP shills out there:

• make all your data immutable
• index snapshots of your data using "purely functional" batch computing (e.g. MapReduce)
• index the realtime data arriving after the last snapshot using an incremental computing system
• for querying, merge the index of the last batch job with that of the incremental system

As Marz explains, incremental computing has a much higher complexity than batch computing. Using it only for the last few hours of data removes a huge complexity burden from your shoulders:

Since the realtime layer only compensates for the last few hours of data, everything the realtime layer computes is eventually overridden by the batch layer. So if you make a mistake or something goes wrong in the realtime layer, the batch layer will correct it. All that complexity is transient.

Programming Language Checklist

Programming Language Checklist: You appear to be advocating a new programming language. Your language will not work. Here is why it will not work.

(via @importantshock)