Greatest Software Ever Written 4230

Sure. This requires a lot of thinking by a lot of people.

Of course. IIRC, TW had these kinds of problems when he wrote disk drive and channel software. That's a parallelism too.

Sure. None would have been solved without the tool. My point was to emphasize that the tool should exist (or a kiddie should be a aware that such a thing exists); I would never declare that all problems can be solved with DDT. That would be as stupid as Bell declaring all software and patches are to be written in BLISS.

They may be subtle to you; they are not to me. In our corner of the biz we had to have clear definitions so we could talk about design without any fuzziness about the specifications. The thread in the PDP10 newsgroup about libraries and OTSes is an example of how we distinguished between static and dynamic during design discussions. Computerese has to have 10 volumes of meaning buttigned to each noun or we would never get anything done.

Correct. That's why OSes were invented. Most everything done with commercial is downstream data processing (I'm thinking about bit flows and how they are mbuttaged).

I was always paranoid of this. You can't get an independent "measurement". The hidden buttumptions of programmer of the offeneding code will also reside in the watcher of that code. This is because the two were developed together, even if the work was done by different people.

You don't understand. It means that the future scientists do not have to wait 20 school years' worth to start doing real science and practicing lab work especially the setups. He doesn't have to do calculus to get his calculations done. It's in his laptop. He has to learn this stuff eventually.

Nah, I loose control sometimes and regain hope in humanity.

BAH