Lambda the Ultimate

Laugh and learn!

I have learned more from my failures than can ever be revealed in the cold print of a scientific article and now I would like you to learn from them, too. Besides, failures are much more fun to hear about afterwards; they are not so funny at the time...

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it. Our applications are complex because we are ambitious to use our computers in ever more sophisticated ways. Programming is complex because of the large number of conflicting objectives for each of our programming projects. If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

The principle of compactness of object code is even more valid today, when processors are trivially cheap in comparison with the amounts of main store they can address, and backing stores are comparatively even more expensive and slower by many orders of magnitude.

That's still true, even today, 23 years later. The only difference is that you'd need to replace "backing store" with "RAM", and "main store" with "instruction cache". This demonstrates the fact that computer performance is on an exponential growth curve very clearly, since there's a self-similarity law for such curves.

Good point.

This demonstrates the fact that computer performance is on an exponential growth curve very clearly, since there's a self-similarity law for such curves.

Hardly. While there is undoubtedly a wealth of data to support Moore's Law (is that what you meant?), not only is two a poor sample size, but any recursively definable function evidently obeys at least one self-similarity law. :)