[HN Gopher] What if mass storage were free? - George Copeland (1...
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What if mass storage were free? - George Copeland (1980) [pdf]
Author : thunderbong
Score : 27 points
Date : 2023-12-01 08:40 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| Basically he's describing immutable storage and what we now call
| write-append-log DB backend.
|
| Quite a foresight at time when microcomputers persisted data on
| audio tapes and Sinclair launched a computer with custom chassis,
| keyboard, PCB and 3.5MHz Z80 CPU,..., but yet chose to include
| only 1kB of RAM to keep the costs low.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Dijkstra once --when the discipline of CS was itself much
| younger-- wrote something to the effect of "how are we supposed
| to teach our students things that will last their lifetimes?"
|
| (ie if today's kids are ~20, what could we teach that will
| still be relevant for computing in ~2070?)
| jbandela1 wrote:
| Discrete mathematics and calculus.
|
| Also, likely Java. I bet there will still be Java code
| running in 2070.
| ralferoo wrote:
| I bet there will still be COBOL code running in 2070.
| axlee wrote:
| Haven't most of these codebases moved to C#/Java over the
| past 20 years? I feel like Cobol is truly a thing of the
| past, even for your average old-school bank/insurance
| behemoth, but then I might live in a bubble.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Does Java (or it's programmers) know how to represent
| decimal numbers and fractions at the machine level?
|
| COBOL is used in banking because it natively supported
| decimal floats from the 70s or some crap, and no other
| language bothers to truly try and be a COBOL replacement.
|
| Banking / insurance / etc etc are on the Dollar/Penny
| system. They need 0.01 to be exactly 0.01, and not
| 0.09999997 or whatever double precision decides to round
| that to.
|
| And remember, there are fractions of a penny. Ex: $15.097
| could be a real price that needs to be exactly
| calculated.
|
| -------
|
| If this crap hasn't been figured out in the last 20
| years, why would Java or C# programmers try to solve it
| in the next 20 years?
|
| It's more likely for the old COBOL code to just keep
| running along than to port over to a language that
| doesn't even meet your legal requirements.
| epylar wrote:
| Python's decimal library does this pretty well.
| https://docs.python.org/3/library/decimal.html
| axlee wrote:
| In Java, BigDecimal (https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/java
| se/21/docs/api/java.base...) is the standard. It's used
| widely in every bank around the world. In Python, you
| have Decimal. In C#, Decimal works also great.
|
| It's not like COBOL has a particular edge against
| "modern" languages, but it has legacy with it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Some has, but there's still a very large and active COBOL
| installed base, and there's still active COBOL
| development taking place.
|
| In fact, COBOL devs tend to be better paid these days,
| because they're critical but there are fewer of them.
|
| The deal is that companies who rely on such software have
| a solid, time-proven, solution. Switching that out just
| to change to a different language would be irresponsibly
| risky.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I use discrete math quite often, but rarely calculus--at
| least nothing more complicated than knowing what integrals
| and derivatives are (not how to actually calculate them). I
| mainly work at the application level, though: understanding
| business processes and other "soft" skills are much more
| relevant than advanced math.
|
| I fully expect some companies to still be using Java 8 in
| fifty years.
| JohnFen wrote:
| There probably will be Java code running in 2070. As well
| as Python, C, C++, COBOL, Fortran, etc.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| Concepts.
|
| What changes over time is syntax, but most of the concepts
| remain.
|
| Source: 30+ year SysAdmin.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| Including mass storage not being free :(
| samsquire wrote:
| If machines are still Turing tape machines at their heart
| that follow instructions as in assembly.
|
| Or we're all encoding behaviours as activations of vectors in
| English language prompting
| JohnFen wrote:
| The fundamentals and concepts haven't changed much at all,
| and probably won't for a very, very long time. If you have a
| good handle on those, everything else is relatively easy to
| pick up -- even the really new stuff.
|
| What concerns me about new CS grads is that they're not only
| lacking a lot of the fundamentals, they sometimes even argue
| that learning them isn't useful.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| `curl http://fundamentals.io | sudo bash -`. checkmate, old
| man.
|
| edit: forgot `curl -k`. like anyone have time to deal with
| those cert errors.
| rekabis wrote:
| Is there even any kind of an online resource that defines
| these "fundamentals" in a widely-agreed-upon basis, and
| focuses on only said fundamentals as a purpose-built resource
| of high specificity?
|
| If so, it's only a Google search away for these young'uns.
|
| Or, as a mangled quote attributed to Einstein goes, "Never
| memorize what you can look up in books."
| jollyllama wrote:
| grep
| deobald wrote:
| I get the impression this was discovered in the Endatabas
| bibliography, since the same user just posted a link to the
| quickstart.
|
| https://www.endatabas.com/bibliography.html
|
| ...Copeland's paper is a fun and inspirational read. If you enjoy
| that, you'll probably enjoy other papers from this list.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| Did you use it or are involved in the project?
|
| wonder how it compares with postgre temporal table or just
| adding a `entity_history` somewhere. Or the timeline data is
| more intrinsic to the DB design on this one?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Prices have never been cheaper and yet deletion strategies remain
| important. The flaw in this assumption is twofold - data creation
| grows faster than the price drops and "garbage" data can have
| performance implications. Cloud storage providers love it if you
| never delete data because they're charging you more than it
| costs, but internally they need to carefully and speedily delete
| data you've asked them to delete because it's a cost (you're not
| getting billed for it).
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