Rants About Software

[Originally published 08/10/07]

A new book is out, entitled Computer Science Reconsidered: The Invocation Model of Process Expression. In this book, the author, Karl M. Fant, seeks to remove mathematics, more specifically, the notion of the algorithm, from it's position as the foundation of Computer Science.

"Mathematicians and computer scientists are pursuing fundamentally different aims, and the mathematician's tools are not as appropriate as was once supposed to the questions of the computer scientist. The primary questions of computer science are not of computational possibilities but of expressional possibilities. Computer science does not need a theory of computation; it needs a comprehensive theory of process expression."

There are so many things wrong with this man's ideas that I don't know if I'll be able to fit it all in one blog post, but I'll do my best to sum it all up.

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[Originally published 04/05/07]

I recently read an interesting quote...

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
-Henry Petroski

New advancements in hardware are being made at an incredible rate. Just compare the specs of the computer you're using now to the one you were using 6-8 years ago. It's quite an impressive change, isn't it? However, with all of these hardware advancements, are we really seeing a very drastic improvement on performance? Your CPU may be three times faster, but is MS Word running three times faster? Changes in software performance really aren't doing a good job of reflecting the technological advances of the past few years.

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