Re: WWW/Internet 2009: 2nd CFP until 21 September x

Walter Mitty wrote:
...
> I was once an assembly language type myself. ...

A boss once said to me "you assembler programmers can never see the big picture". I think there is some pernicious truth in this, the bare-mental mentality that creeps into one's perspective reminds me of the disjointed murals from the 13th century before painters discovered visual perspective. It didn't matter if the figures were in the foreground or background, the person who was taller in real life was taller in the mural.

My guess is that faulty perspective (eg., machine perspective) partly explains how System R ended up with a language that is so limited. Even Codd used file-system conventions for naming his early relations (so-called "generation data groups"). There was about a hundred years of chaos in the art world until the new perspective was accepted. Similar chaos in the db world today, the IT world too.

By the 1980's some cpu designs no longer needed assemblers to be written, instead they were generated from high-level specifications. The previous generation bootstraps the next generation. Maybe one day the world will wake up to find there are no assembler programmers left. Received on Mon Aug 17 2009 - 16:23:43 CEST