Joel's History of Computing

But then, while you’re sitting on your googlechair in the googleplex sipping googleccinos and feeling smuggy smug smug smug, new versions of the browsers come out that support cached, compiled JavaScript. And suddenly NewSDK is really fast. And Paul Graham gives them another 6000 boxes of instant noodles to eat, so they stay in business another three years perfecting things.

I just read this entry from Joel and I laughed out loud. It's funny, but it's also incredibly insightful. In a way, it's Joel's answer to Steve's New Big Language, but much more ambitious in its predictions and prognostications. I like it a lot.

Just for the record, a few of the genius observations from this essay have briefly visited my thoughts. I've pondered the various Ajax user interfaces that are all over the place. I've really been bothered that writing a web application seems to be a major step backwards in development methodologies, not to mention how slow they are. Of course, I never bothered to write these ideas down and develop them like Joel has here. I'm kicking myself now for that. Oh well.

Actually, lately I've been pondering more about whether embedded software will ever be written in a higher-level language than C or C++ (no, I don't really consider C++ to be higher-level than C). I think the real-time parts of firmware will always have need to be optimizable down to assembly to squeeze out every last clock cycle, but there are large portions of firmware that aren't real-time. I guess cell phones are already running Java apps, but if you read Joel's blog entry, you notice that he pointed this scenario out precisely because it's a good example of how badly the Java VM approach works:

You can follow the p-code/Java model and build a little sandbox on top of the underlying system. But sandboxes are penalty boxes; they’re slow and they suck, which is why Java Applets are dead, dead, dead. To build a sandbox you pretty much doom yourself to running at 1/10th the speed of the underlying platform, and you doom yourself to never supporting any of the cool features that show up on one of the platforms but not the others. (I’m still waiting for someone show me a Java applet for phones that can access any the phone’s features, like the camera, the contacts list, the SMS messages, or the GPS receiver.)

So I don't think anything more than simple games are going to be written for embedded platforms in a higher level language like Java. I'm thinking most interpreted languages here, like Python, Ruby, etc. are in that "like Java" group in this scenario (sad, I know). It's going to have to be something that compiles to "native" code (the machine code for your target processor, of course), but still has high-level language features like memory management, and dynamic typing, and all those other things that we love about Perl, Python, and so forth. So let's hear it. What will be the NBL for embedded systems?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SystemVerilog Fork Disable "Gotchas"

This is a long post with a lot of SystemVerilog code. The purpose of this entry is to hopefully save you from beating your head against the wall trying to figure out some of the subtleties of SystemVerilog processes (basically, threads). Subtleties like these are commonly referred to in the industry as "Gotchas" which makes them sound so playful and fun, but they really aren't either. I encourage you to run these examples with your simulator (if you have access to one) so that a) you can see the results first hand and better internalize what's going on, and b) you can tell me in the comments if this code works fine for you and I'll know I should go complain to my simulator vendor. OK, I'll start with a warm-up that everyone who writes any Verilog or SystemVerilog at all should be aware of, tasks are static by default. If you do this: module top; task do_stuff ( int wait_time); #wait_time $display ( "waited %0d, then did stuff" , wa
Read more

'git revert' Is Not Equivalent To 'svn revert'

I just learned that if you have some changes in your working tree that you want to get rid of, you don't type 'git revert' like you might guess. No, that's what cvs, subversion, mercurial, and bazaar (to name a few) use revert to mean, but not git. With git, revert is used to undo actual commits. Thankfully, you can undo your revert with another 'git revert', I just learned. So let me repeat to be clear, if you have changes to your working files that you want to abandon, DO NOT do this: git revert HEAD That will undo your last commit. Do this instead: git reset --hard HEAD I'm glad I have that straightened out now. I'm wondering if /etc was really a good place for me to start out playing with git. UPDATE: Nearly two years later and I'm still getting comments on this. I'm glad I've been able to help people out this way. The discussion in the comments is good, and one thing I'd like to point out is that I now always use
Read more

Put /etc Under Revision Control (with git)

UPDATE : There is a much easier way now : sudo aptitude install etckeeper There, now etc is under revision control and changes are automatically committed with a helpful message after you install new packages. Thanks for the tip, Marcelo! Read on for the original blog entry. --- I put my /etc directory under revision control. I used git. It's awesome. Not that I think I'm going to wholesale copy my /etc from one machine to another, nor because I'm going to branch my /etc directory and spend weeks developing some cool new feature (whatever that would look like...) and then merge it back into the main branch. No, it's mostly because I like the idea of having the big "undo" option that having things under revision control provides. Having to commit changes and write check-in comments when I make changes helps me stay more organized too. It's never good when I go in willy-nilly to make a "quick change" to some configuration file. I r
Read more