On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 02:07:58PM +0200, Carlos Gershenson wrote:
>
> Also agree, but what I claim is that maybe the evolution of software
> is not exponential, as it is with hardware, so there would be no
> singularity in sight...
I wouldn't be surprised if software development was actually
exponential, however it is harder to measure improvement, and the
improvement is not a smooth as hardware improvement.
During my 25 years of programming computers, I have seen several
revolutionary "jumps" in software: vectorisation, parallelisation,
object-oriented programming, higher-level scripting (Perl, Python et
al), evolutionary algorithms ...
Each of these software techniques has brought orders of magnitude of
increased functionality, but in each case the effect is different
(generally not across the board), and hard to quantify. During the
same period we have seen approximately 8 generations of Intel
processors or 5 orders of magnitude in processor performance, measured
on the same scale
Cheers
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