The RISC architecture is good, as they say anything small and working is good! This is my fellow programmers is a philosophy of *nix*; how many years has gone by? Stupid thirty years and do not question it; because that’s the best idea we have got and we are following it. Doing great stuff, building systems on top of it, I agree. But has it ever came to your mind that why this is like THIS? Why we have to use the same old RISC for our computing? The answer is we have stopped innovating in the real sense. We now know that we need more data types, arithmetic operations and better instruction set to carry out an operation. But at the end of the day all we have is a *MOVE* or *STORE* or *LOAD* and we say that Lisp, Java or Ruby runs slowly. These programming languages are not close to low level and thus will take some time to actually execute it in our cute processors.
Tomorrow if we try to develop a programming language which is more higher level we will not be able to convince our bosses that this is the right way of doing things. Because they will tell us, “look at the performance man!” And an innovation will die. Once upon a time C was considered higher level language than machine language, yes true but you need to write a 20 lines of code to reverse a link list or worse link list is not a basic data types.
I do not blame any one but tell me is it fair to ask a student of computer science to write a link list reversal program in Java. I don’t think so. If you can declare link list as a data type and you have a method to reverse it please reverse it using that; and if your computer is taking more time to do that for link list of 10000 elements blame it on the computer not the programming language even if the C/C++ implementation is taking less time. This is because of the abstraction that this high level programming language is providing. C/C++ on the other hand is good because there is very low level abstraction in it and you have to build rest of the thing.
In programming world this is like saying to the programmer it’s my way or highway. So if the instructions set are evolved up to the level of say C then what happens? The magic starts then you can still program in C as now you still have a choice program in assembly language; but it will be better to choose a higher level language.
We have come from binaries to pneumonic to assembly, but we are long due for the next higher level let us just take the next step, and which programming language we should choose is up for debate…..or is it not clear?
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