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From: Dan Bale <dbale@samsa.com> > I concur with most of your post, Leif. The tendency is there to overdesign. > You didn't mention hindsight though, which, of course, is 20/20. > The issue was not if one could improve ILE, but rather that ILE is too complex for its own good. It should be simplified. Since I'm in the mood of being reminded of wisdom of an age gone by, the following words from A.C. Hartman (a student of an old colleague of mine, Per Brinch Hansen): "In the world of Brinch Hansen's, all systems tend towards reduced entropy over time and toward a blissful state of ultimate simplicity. Each new release of the operating system is smaller than the previous release, consumes fewer resources, runs faster on simpler hardware, provides a reduced set of easier to use features than the last release, and carries a lower price tag. Hardware designers espousing the same philosophy produce successive single-chip microprocessors with exponentially declining transistor counts from generation to generation, dramatically shrinking die sizes, and reducing process steps by resorting to fewer, simpler device types. No one would need to "invent RISC computing in this world, since reduced feature sets would be an inexorable law of nature." Alas, Hartman is describing something that may "exist is some parallel dimension to ours" because that ain't the way the trend is. We are forgetting (or rather: ignoring) that complexity is the enemy and should be avoided at all costs.
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