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Comment by beat

Programming is futuristic in a 1950s sort of way. There's a classic Astounding Magazine cover from the era of a guy aggressively boarding a spaceship or something with a ray gun in his hand and a slide rule in his teeth.

In other words, it's not futuristic because we're not terribly good at imagining the future.

The guts of modern computing is based on the fundamental logical architecture of Von Neumann and others, work of the 1940s and 1950s. We may be building things in software that couldn't have been imagined back then, but we're building it on structures designed back then.

Look at the iPad and modern tablet computers, in many ways the pinnacle of the modern computer movement. Then look up Alan Kay's Dynabook, which he invented (conceptually) in 1968! We're just now catching up with his vision from 45 years ago.

parent beat 13 years ago

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