Logica Bolivia: Software is Not Even a Load of Utter Crap

Below is how the Ars Technica UK Security page looks like today. The verdict is pretty clear. Software isn't an eco-system. The ecosystem is a product of Intelligent Design, and modern software is only a junk-yard full of useless garbage that won't even rot properly. Any kind of shit at all, is worth more than modern software is worth.

Now the stupidest thing to do would be to start writing the same useless crap all over again. Instead, we need to design application-specific languages and interpreters for those languages. Then instead of boring ourselves stupid by writing a load of broken code by hand, we write the interpreters which will write the code implementing the specifications we write in those application-specific languages. Then whenever we find that we've done yet something else incredibly fucking stupid, we just change the interpreters, and regenerate all the applications, thereby fixing all the fuck-witted bugs in all the applications, all at one fell swoop.

Adobe flash isn't anything more than an horrendously badly written interpreter for an horrendously badly designed language that in fact hardly does anything at all. So if we want to replace it we just design a decent abstraction of a few different types of processor, and a few application languages: for example, one language for specifying vector graphics, another for raster graphics and applying filters and whatever, and another for scheduling animated graphics and audio streams, another for processing real-time user input events and another for remote procedure calls over network connections.

Then we design a language for specifying raster graphic constructions at around the level at which the pixman primitives work, and another for specifying drawing at the level of bezier curves, fills, etc., around the level at which Cairo works. Then we design a language for specifying glyphs in fonts using those primitives, and we produce a FEW really good fonts by interpreting languages that were designed to specify those particular fonts. Then we define a language for specifying the abstract topology of the characters, and interpret those glyph programs into the font-specific languages, which we in turn interpret into the language for specifying raster graphics primitives. Then when someone defines a Greek capital Sigma, they just write the description of the topology and the Sigma appears in Arial, Times New Roman and Garamond No 8, all at the same time, and perfectly matching all those fonts.

Then we can interpret those raster graphics primitives as generic abstract assembler code, and then reinterpret the results as specific assembler, which we JIT compile to some specific processor model and graphics display, both of which are also formally specified using languages designed for exactly that purpose. Then when we flash that JIT compiler into the machine's BIOS ROM area, and it boots in 0.5 seconds, and functions perfectly, and only uses around 2MB of code space, and even if the machine is a 10 year old laptop wired to an old car battery, for 90% of what most people would want to do with it, it is just as fast as a brand new machine costing $2,000. And the application is not just a Flash browser, it does far more than anything anyone could ever imagine wanting to use that computer to do.

That's all you need to know, now go to it ladies. I'm sorry I can't be more help, but I told you all this a year ago, and my reward was that I got left to starve in the streets of La Paz in winter. I rarely eat more than one meal a day, and often none at all, and my health is deteriorating rapidly.

So if you need me to help you, then some of you are going to have to lift yourselves out of your self-indulgent torpor and work out how you can help me to help you. Otherwise I am going to die, and quite frankly I am looking forward to it because the less time I spend in this stupid world, run by idots and madmen, the better. If you don't want to do what I tell you you need to do to solve these silly little problems, and also you can't tell me why it is that you know that you know better than I do, then I don't want to hear anything from you at all, I just want out.

So, is there anyone, anyone at all in this whole wide world, that can come up with an intelligent response to this? Oh go on, please, please, suprise me, I've earned it!

Ian

SPECULATION RUN AMOK