[HN Gopher] What if mass storage were free? - George Copeland (1...
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What if mass storage were free? - George Copeland (1980) [pdf]
 
Author : thunderbong
Score  : 27 points
Date   : 2023-12-01 08:40 UTC (14 hours ago)
 
web link (dl.acm.org)
w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
 
| repelsteeltje wrote:
| Basically he's describing immutable storage and what we now call
| write-append-log DB backend.
| 
| Quite a foresight at time when microcomputers persisted data on
| audio tapes and Sinclair launched a computer with custom chassis,
| keyboard, PCB and 3.5MHz Z80 CPU,..., but yet chose to include
| only 1kB of RAM to keep the costs low.
 
  | 082349872349872 wrote:
  | Dijkstra once --when the discipline of CS was itself much
  | younger-- wrote something to the effect of "how are we supposed
  | to teach our students things that will last their lifetimes?"
  | 
  | (ie if today's kids are ~20, what could we teach that will
  | still be relevant for computing in ~2070?)
 
    | jbandela1 wrote:
    | Discrete mathematics and calculus.
    | 
    | Also, likely Java. I bet there will still be Java code
    | running in 2070.
 
      | ralferoo wrote:
      | I bet there will still be COBOL code running in 2070.
 
        | axlee wrote:
        | Haven't most of these codebases moved to C#/Java over the
        | past 20 years? I feel like Cobol is truly a thing of the
        | past, even for your average old-school bank/insurance
        | behemoth, but then I might live in a bubble.
 
        | dragontamer wrote:
        | Does Java (or it's programmers) know how to represent
        | decimal numbers and fractions at the machine level?
        | 
        | COBOL is used in banking because it natively supported
        | decimal floats from the 70s or some crap, and no other
        | language bothers to truly try and be a COBOL replacement.
        | 
        | Banking / insurance / etc etc are on the Dollar/Penny
        | system. They need 0.01 to be exactly 0.01, and not
        | 0.09999997 or whatever double precision decides to round
        | that to.
        | 
        | And remember, there are fractions of a penny. Ex: $15.097
        | could be a real price that needs to be exactly
        | calculated.
        | 
        | -------
        | 
        | If this crap hasn't been figured out in the last 20
        | years, why would Java or C# programmers try to solve it
        | in the next 20 years?
        | 
        | It's more likely for the old COBOL code to just keep
        | running along than to port over to a language that
        | doesn't even meet your legal requirements.
 
        | epylar wrote:
        | Python's decimal library does this pretty well.
        | https://docs.python.org/3/library/decimal.html
 
        | axlee wrote:
        | In Java, BigDecimal (https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/java
        | se/21/docs/api/java.base...) is the standard. It's used
        | widely in every bank around the world. In Python, you
        | have Decimal. In C#, Decimal works also great.
        | 
        | It's not like COBOL has a particular edge against
        | "modern" languages, but it has legacy with it.
 
        | JohnFen wrote:
        | Some has, but there's still a very large and active COBOL
        | installed base, and there's still active COBOL
        | development taking place.
        | 
        | In fact, COBOL devs tend to be better paid these days,
        | because they're critical but there are fewer of them.
        | 
        | The deal is that companies who rely on such software have
        | a solid, time-proven, solution. Switching that out just
        | to change to a different language would be irresponsibly
        | risky.
 
      | organsnyder wrote:
      | I use discrete math quite often, but rarely calculus--at
      | least nothing more complicated than knowing what integrals
      | and derivatives are (not how to actually calculate them). I
      | mainly work at the application level, though: understanding
      | business processes and other "soft" skills are much more
      | relevant than advanced math.
      | 
      | I fully expect some companies to still be using Java 8 in
      | fifty years.
 
      | JohnFen wrote:
      | There probably will be Java code running in 2070. As well
      | as Python, C, C++, COBOL, Fortran, etc.
 
    | sonicanatidae wrote:
    | Concepts.
    | 
    | What changes over time is syntax, but most of the concepts
    | remain.
    | 
    | Source: 30+ year SysAdmin.
 
      | 1oooqooq wrote:
      | Including mass storage not being free :(
 
    | samsquire wrote:
    | If machines are still Turing tape machines at their heart
    | that follow instructions as in assembly.
    | 
    | Or we're all encoding behaviours as activations of vectors in
    | English language prompting
 
    | JohnFen wrote:
    | The fundamentals and concepts haven't changed much at all,
    | and probably won't for a very, very long time. If you have a
    | good handle on those, everything else is relatively easy to
    | pick up -- even the really new stuff.
    | 
    | What concerns me about new CS grads is that they're not only
    | lacking a lot of the fundamentals, they sometimes even argue
    | that learning them isn't useful.
 
      | 1oooqooq wrote:
      | `curl http://fundamentals.io | sudo bash -`. checkmate, old
      | man.
      | 
      | edit: forgot `curl -k`. like anyone have time to deal with
      | those cert errors.
 
    | rekabis wrote:
    | Is there even any kind of an online resource that defines
    | these "fundamentals" in a widely-agreed-upon basis, and
    | focuses on only said fundamentals as a purpose-built resource
    | of high specificity?
    | 
    | If so, it's only a Google search away for these young'uns.
    | 
    | Or, as a mangled quote attributed to Einstein goes, "Never
    | memorize what you can look up in books."
 
    | jollyllama wrote:
    | grep
 
| deobald wrote:
| I get the impression this was discovered in the Endatabas
| bibliography, since the same user just posted a link to the
| quickstart.
| 
| https://www.endatabas.com/bibliography.html
| 
| ...Copeland's paper is a fun and inspirational read. If you enjoy
| that, you'll probably enjoy other papers from this list.
 
  | 1oooqooq wrote:
  | Did you use it or are involved in the project?
  | 
  | wonder how it compares with postgre temporal table or just
  | adding a `entity_history` somewhere. Or the timeline data is
  | more intrinsic to the DB design on this one?
 
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Prices have never been cheaper and yet deletion strategies remain
| important. The flaw in this assumption is twofold - data creation
| grows faster than the price drops and "garbage" data can have
| performance implications. Cloud storage providers love it if you
| never delete data because they're charging you more than it
| costs, but internally they need to carefully and speedily delete
| data you've asked them to delete because it's a cost (you're not
| getting billed for it).
 
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