CPSC401 - Spring 2009

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Questions from first essay

1. Will we even be writing programs in a hundred years? Won't we just tell computers what we want them to do? References question 1 Graham

2. How will we take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware? References question 2 Graham

3. How far will this flattening of data structures go? I can think of possibilities that shock even me, with my conscientiously broadened mind. Will we get rid of arrays, for example? After all, they're just a subset of hash tables where the keys are vectors of integers. Will we replace hash tables themselves with lists? References question 3 Graham

4. Could a programming language go so far as to get rid of numbers as a fundamental data type? References question 4 Graham

5. The real question is, how far up the ladder of abstraction will parallelism go? In a hundred years will it affect even application programmers? Or will it be something that compiler writers think about, but which is usually invisible in the source code of applications? References question 5 Graham

6. Mr. Graham states: "Inefficient software isn't gross. What's gross is a language that makes programmers do needless work. Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time. This will become ever more clear as computers get faster.' Is it the case that optimization of code is not something that programmers should be concerned with? References question 6 Graham