Abstract Heresies
Ran across this earlier today and thought I'd make a quick blog posting about it. In some ways it must have been a lot of fun to be able to work on a machine that had code in the same language all the way down to the metal. Especially when debugging hard to find problems. Homogeneous systems will probably be something we will never see again as more and more code moves to virtual machine like environments. The beauty of homogeneity is outweighed by the practicality of being able to use multiple languages to solve problems. Even lisp does not do all things equally well even though some I'm sure would disagree. And so, we live in the practical world of differing languages all running together on heterogeneous systems.
I have had a stray and odd thought. Programmers are very biased to their language(s) of choice. Most never really get beyond their one core language though they may dabble in others. With the advent of Microsofts CLR and the fact that a lot of other languages seem to be moving to the JVM, it does make me wonder if someday we will be able to cross compile code from one language to another. I'm sure those that work on compilers for a living will be quick to tell me it's not possible. But I do wonder if being able to translate to a different language might not make certain types of bugs obvious and/or allow quicker code generation because you can switch to a language that excels at a particular task.
Regardless, something to think about.
Ran across this earlier today and thought I'd make a quick blog posting about it. In some ways it must have been a lot of fun to be able to work on a machine that had code in the same language all the way down to the metal. Especially when debugging hard to find problems. Homogeneous systems will probably be something we will never see again as more and more code moves to virtual machine like environments. The beauty of homogeneity is outweighed by the practicality of being able to use multiple languages to solve problems. Even lisp does not do all things equally well even though some I'm sure would disagree. And so, we live in the practical world of differing languages all running together on heterogeneous systems.
I have had a stray and odd thought. Programmers are very biased to their language(s) of choice. Most never really get beyond their one core language though they may dabble in others. With the advent of Microsofts CLR and the fact that a lot of other languages seem to be moving to the JVM, it does make me wonder if someday we will be able to cross compile code from one language to another. I'm sure those that work on compilers for a living will be quick to tell me it's not possible. But I do wonder if being able to translate to a different language might not make certain types of bugs obvious and/or allow quicker code generation because you can switch to a language that excels at a particular task.
Regardless, something to think about.
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