Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Seibel: Do you think that the nature of programming has changed as a consequence of the fact that we can't know how it all works anymore? Cosell: Oh, yeah. That's another thing that makes me a little bit more dinosaurlike. Everything builds assuming what came before. I remember on our old PDP-11, 7th edition Unix, we were doing some animation and graphics. That was a big deal. It was hard to program. The displays weren't handy. There were no libraries. Each generation of programmers gets farther and farther away from the low-level stuff and has fancier and fancier tools for doing things. The good part is they can do cleverer things. The baseline is so good that the next thing is spectacular and that then becomes the baseline and two years later it becomes even better. The trouble is that these baselines are getting more and more complicated. The PDP-1 instruction set was like a walk in the park compared to some of the stuff that's happening. I would hate to be the guys at Microsoft who have to build these operating systems that run on the quad-core multiprocessor. Video cards have grown to the point where they have multiple megs of memory, and complete pipeline parallel processors on them that can do array and vector things on the fly. So you now use your video card as this very fancy data processor. I keep thinking how hard it must be to program these things. We had a thing called an IMLAC, which is one of the early machines that actually had a nice integrated vector disp...