OT: Then vs Now Programming WAS: Re: AMD vs Intel memory managemement

[Matt Graham]

From: Nathan England
> I hear stories like this of these amazing things people did with
> computers 30 and 40 years ago and then the comment always comes up
> like "And we only had xx kb of ram".
> 
> Was programming in what ever language they used back then more 
> efficient and today's languages are seriously bloated and require
> more ram, or do programmers today not know how to program as
> efficiently?  Or what gives?

Slow CPUs meant it was actually worth it for people to hand-optimize assembly
code.  Since CPU and RAM are much cheaper than paying somebody $LOTS/hour to
bang on the code so that it's 10% faster, nobody worries about spending the
time to make it faster.  The old saw "0. make it work 1. make it maintainable
2. (optional) make it fast" has never been truer.  In game development, step 0
is actually optional AFAICT.

Memory protection works at the page level as well; all beginning C programmers
have probably run off the end of their "stuff int[45]"-- you can usually do
"stuff[47]" and not get any errors at all (unless you've enabled the paranoid
memory protection things like ElectricFence).

(Part of the problem with doing stuff with DNA is that genes from bacteria to
mammals appear to be optimized for space, not clarity, and all the comments
have been stripped out.)

From: Alan Dayley
> The amount of code that makes it possible to click a "Send" button
> with a mouse is way more than you imagine but we don't have to
> worry about it because we have oodles of ram and GHz.

Er... the 1984 Mac (128K RAM, CPU at relatively few MHz) could've had a mail
program with a GUI if it'd had some sort of NIC.  Of course, it would've been
dependent on the ROM for graphics ops, black-n-white only, and would've
crashed if you looked cross-eyed at it, but it could've had a MUA ~= pine with
clicky buttons.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see