Linked by Takuya Murata on Tue 18th May 2004 06:26 UTC
My physics teacher likes to say that physics like to make problems they face look like ones that they know how to solve. A simple harmonic oscillation was one he frequently used in class, as is presumably the case in physics in general.
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"Shouldn't we have software systems that have abstracted extremely complex operations in an automated, intellegent & self-executing fashion by now?"
Isn't a Windowing system a good example of this? In the DOS days, everyone had to write their own window management, and handle the notifications and feedback and drawing. With systems like VB, Windows Forms, Interface Builder and the like, aren't these a good example of how 'extremely complex operations' have been 'abstracted' into a 'automated, intellegent & self-executing fashion'?
And following the same logic, all scripting languages such as perl are effectively reusable libraries that sit upon tried and true languages such as C and assembler. Try writing a complex string searching function in C and Perl and you'll find that Perl is a far quicker, more elegant solution (ie. abstracted away from how we 'used to program').
And echoing the comment by daniel c, products like SoftWire abstract these complex issues even further away from 'how we used to program in the past' which I believe was the authors original point.
I agree wholeheartedly with the comment by KamuSan -- 'Every language has it's pros and cons. The trick is to use the right tool for the job'. It's very easy to write a 60-storey doghouse using the wrong tool. Try writing a Windows device driver using VB and you'll find that you'll have no end of problems (if it's even possible). Sometimes to get the job done you have to think, rather than just draw pretty dialogs in VB.