I look at the world through the lens of Design rather than the lens of Styling. Of course, many people use the term Design as a fancy word for Styling, as in Hair Design. What I mean by Design is creation of structure which fulfills a purpose excellently, including being affordable and sustainable. Design has been a passion of mine as long as I can remember. I look at everything through the lens of design.
Most (but not all) of the Design Notes in this Repository relate to Computing, and especially to fairly high-level Computing Abstractions. This is only natural because computing has fascinated me since childhood and has been my profession for most of my adult life.
Even modest computers have the ability to magnify results a billion-fold, so the quality of the design of computing systems is especially consequential. I’ve been following developments in computing since childhood and I noticed some recurring themes which have stifled good design
Common Computing Equipment was severely limited in capacity, especially memory capacity, throughout the 20th Century. These limitations didn’t start clearing up with common computing equipment until the AMD64 architecture arrived in 1999. Up until then nearly all computer systems were limited to a 32-bit address space. The arrival of solid state disk drives and Gigabit (and better) Internet Connections has also opened up possibilities, but easing memory constraints has been a complete game changer.
The best systems of the 20th Century provide many examples of extraordinary creative genius. Yet their full possibilities were often not followed up on because they were ahead of their time. With the ending of these severe constraints, we should be in a period of rapid progress in the power and quality of systems. I don’t see this as happening yet - so let’s make it happen!
A common pattern over the last 50 years of computing has been
- Some brilliant folks would develop a concept for making computers more powerful and more useful.
- The idea would fail to achieve anywhere near its full potential, partly because of the severe limitations of computer systems of those early days - especially memory limitations.
- Inferior designs would win out and become familiar and often standardized.
- Newer systems would be build on top of such systems with their own potential limited or extinguished by the designs of the older parts.
- Few would notice the missed opportunities because the systems behaved as expected.
Good news: Visionary projects which didn’t get a chance to fulfill their potential are now valuable low-hanging fruit.
Even late 20th century 32-bit computer systems were capable of storing programs of a size and complexity completely beyond any reasonable ability of competent computer professionals to understand them. Indeed, many of the best modern designs came about from more constrained 16-bit systems, e.g. Unix which set the standard for most modern Operating Systems.
Ironically a lot of the unfortunate complexity of earlier systems was caused by strategies for dealing with a lack of system capacities. For example, complex data structures and intrinsic links were used rather than using a simple relational model with indexes. We could have used increasing memory capacities and increases in computational speed to simplify and generalize our software systems, leading to software which was easier to understand and easier to improve. Instead, we simply wrote large amounts of code of often less quality because we could get away with it in the short term. Older institutions are burdened with vast amounts of unmaintainable code which they rely on for their immediate operations.
As an example of a major missed opportunity: When the Y2K problem come along, the ideal way forward would have been to replace the majority of huge old Cobol programs with simple small programs interfacing with modern relational databases. SQL is much more maintainable than procedural language code. Instead armies of programmers were recruited - and hastily trained - to patch those old systems, rendering them even less comprehensible. And deploying this army of programmers to patch old code robbed the rest of our enterprises of essential resources to create new software to fulfill their missions.