"If computing is important -- for daily life, learning, business, national defense, jobs, and more -- then qualitatively advancing computing is extremely important. Fro example, many software systems today are made from millions to hundreds of millions of lines of program code that is too large, complex and fragile to be improved, fixed, or integrated. (One hundred million lines of code at 50 lines per page is 5000 books of 400 pages each! This is beyond humane scale.)
What if this could be made literally 1000 times smaller -- or more? And made more powerful, clear, simple, and robust? This would bring one of the most important technologies of our time from a state that is almost out of human reach -- and dangerously close to being out of control -- back into human scale."
...and of course if you haven't seen it, you'll want to check out the Forth guys who want to do everything with 1000 times less code:
I'm aware of this but Alan Kay's work and this seem to be orthogonal. Alan Kay talks about reducing real systems that have compilers, inputs etc whereas Elements talks about like the day to day ways of writing code. Alan Kay might come up with a new keyword whose semantics magically lets you cut out 30% but Elements shows you that if you make your types behave certain way, generics will let you cut out a lot of code.
I would counter that this appears to be a repeatedly emerging consensus, including Stepanov, Kay, Simonyi, and a number of other "greats", that an approach that involves some degree of metaprogramming, guided by domain problem, is the way forward. They differ on terms - cooperating systems, model-driven, intentional, generic - and focus - whether to create new syntax, or to guide the creation of specific algorithms or data structures - but they aren't debating the power of the approach.
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf
"If computing is important -- for daily life, learning, business, national defense, jobs, and more -- then qualitatively advancing computing is extremely important. Fro example, many software systems today are made from millions to hundreds of millions of lines of program code that is too large, complex and fragile to be improved, fixed, or integrated. (One hundred million lines of code at 50 lines per page is 5000 books of 400 pages each! This is beyond humane scale.)
What if this could be made literally 1000 times smaller -- or more? And made more powerful, clear, simple, and robust? This would bring one of the most important technologies of our time from a state that is almost out of human reach -- and dangerously close to being out of control -- back into human scale."
...and of course if you haven't seen it, you'll want to check out the Forth guys who want to do everything with 1000 times less code:
http://www.ultratechnology.com/forth.htm