[ale] OT: you can't get there with algorithms

[Jim Philips]

I don't usually post things that are on Digg or Slashdot, because I assume 
people have already been exposed to them. But this article, I think, gets at 
the heart of what is wrong with computer programming as it stands today and 
that's no small event. In a recent article published here:

http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~maratb/readings/NoSilverBullet.html

the author asserted that as programs grow in complexity, we will have more 
bugs and that there is no "silver bullet" to eradicate them. The author of 
the later article argues that there is indeed a silver bullet, but we can 
only find it by approaching the whole task of programming in a different way. 
As examples, he points out that as human brains handle increasingly complex 
tasks their rate of failure doesn't go up by anything like the magnitude it 
will go up when you increase the complexity of a program. He also points out 
that hardware systems have grown in complexity without raising the failure 
rate dramatically. He sees the fault in the approach taken with the universal 
Touring machine (UTM). Here is a short breakdown of how he sees the problem:

"Unfortunately for the world, it did not occur to early computer scientists 
that a program is, at its core, a tightly integrated collection of 
communicating entities interacting with each other and with their 
environment. As a result, the computer industry had no choice but to embrace 
a method of software construction that sees the computer simply as a tool for 
the execution of instruction sequences. The problem with this approach is 
that it forces the programmer to explicitly identify and resolve a number of 
critical communication-related  issues that, ideally, should have been 
implicitly and automatically handled at the system level. "

Anyway, I could go on for longer, but here is a link to the article. It makes 
fascinating reading:

http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/Reliability.htm