Reply to post: Re: Article misses a critical point

'Moore's Revenge' is upon us and will make the world weird

Charles 9

Re: Article misses a critical point

"a) Nothing is perfect, but the KISS principle has generally proved a useful way of mitigating that inconvenient fact."

But it ignores two other unfortunate facts of life: the existence of necessary complexity and the nature desire of humans for black-and-white answers in a world with infinite shades of gray. IOW, sometimes the problem at hand has no practical solution (and it's also not as easy to prove it as Turing's Halting Problem proof), yet few are willing to propose to the customer, "Sir, you can't get there from here."

"b) Suggest a better alternative default than 'do one thing and do it well'."

OK, how about "Don't Trust Anything"? The main problem with modern computing is that you can't really trust anything: not the user, not the process before you, and not even the process after you. Things CAN and DO break, and not always for obvious reasons. We're even reaching the point where a "Hello World" can break something serious. Assume that the process before you lied to you about your available resources while the one after you will probably misunderstand you. This Brave New World of computing is probably going to require a total rethink on how we approach solutions: may even force a retreat back to the days where one cannot assume much and may need to do as much as possible with as little as possible (especially with regards to external resources).

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon