the hot new programming language

Now wait a moment, I've been catching the commercials of the upcoming movie "Ant-Man", I wonder how they shrink his atoms down just by a turn of a knob! :))

Jamie

gh

politicians are not going to bite the hand that feeds them

-Lasse

On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 11:24:44 -0400, Phil Hobbs Gave us:

The size won't matter. The speed will outpace all hard electron movement. Eventually.

So even if it is an order of magnitude (or more) smaller in size as it relates to element count, it will still blaze past.

On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 12:38:07 -0400, rickman Gave us:

Pace, not state.

On Sat, 4 Jul 2015 13:16:53 -0400, M Philbrook Gave us:

Oh boy! One nanogram for each one! You'll NOT be rich, man!

Bwuahahahahahaha

On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 13:55:14 -0400, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno Gave us:

I meant larger, actually. Less parts and bigger size in optical iteration, but it won't matter.

So, the smaller reference was about silicon transistor elements, and "it" was about the optical *still* beating it.

Not yet, but hey... it's only "ten years off", just like fusion reactors!

The only subject where COBOL is good, is writing 'Goldilocks and the three bears', as published in Datamation of late 1960's (or early 70's).

It seems to be findable by Google.

How?

Nope, sorry. The speed limits for light are the same as for wire, and the cooling requirements for optical computing are completely intractable, even if we had enough distributed optical gain available, which we don't. (And all that optical gain has to come from electronic transitions anyway.)

Practical all-optical computers are science fantasy only. (Which is too bad, because as you know I'm primarily an optics person.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

One of my former customers has a brother that has been doing COBOL programming for most of his career. He's highly in demand and has been bribed multiple times into coming out of retirement to do some more COBOL work. He has apparently done very well financially.

The way it works is that the C++ or whatever programmers write the front ends that the users see, while he deals with the legacy COBOL back ends that actually do the heavy lifting. He also handles the very important interface layer between the front and back ends. While in most modern systems, the back end is an SQL or DB2 database, in these systems, the database manager is written in COBOL. Data validation is done at the interface, so that the front end programmers and users don't accidentally throw garbage into the database. The prime directive is that nobody will ever change the existing database structure but additional fields are possible. In other words, the database can grow, but never shrink. The resemblance to duct tape and baling wire is not a coincidence.

I'm not sure how much work is available in COBOL programming. Probably not much and all of it maintenance work. My guess(tm) is the reason that carnal knowledge of COBOL produces higher salaries is that the employers can now either replace an expensive COBOL consultant, or have a programmer that can do the job formerly performed by two programmers.

Disclaimer: I am not a programmer and know nothing of COBOL.

On Sat, 04 Jul 2015 14:05:35 -0400, Phil Hobbs Gave us:

And given that, I should take what you have to say about it more than others here (especially here).

But... but... but... The aliens do it so well!

Or is that Ale-ions? hic!

The core reason is the cost of replacing the huge COBOL infrastructure is completely intractable, so it's cheaper to pay up for old programmers.

In the run-up to Y2K, many companies needed to update their infrastructure, and that most of the available COBOL programmers were Russian immigrants - the advantage of being at the trailing edge.

If you read only the computer (versus data processing) magazines of today, you will not have any idea that CORBA and Java et al are just pretty decorations on the big iron. Back when CORBA was the new fad, I spent a lot of time swatting zealots with that. They had no idea that any such thing existed.

Joe Gwinn

Why is cooling harder?

Assuming they are not purely optical but use electronic gain, can they at least provide EMP hardness?

That's not really 3D. There are a relatively very small number of vertical connections. You can't connect each element to hundreds of other elements that way.

Low-dissipation components that don't melt down is part of the requirement for the breakthrough I was refering to.

such complexity is unneeded, inflation already does that, and faster.

Was that last sentence English, AlwaysWrong?

You obviously have never actually used an analog computer, AlwaysWrong. Patchboard ~= breadboard. If complicated enough, both look like spaghetti.

Changing physics is easier than that. It's just a few words in the script (see: Star Trek).

Because you have to keep regenerating all those control photons every picosecond or three in an inefficient process, whereas in CMOS, electrons are free--they just hang around till you move them. That makes optical logic more like ECL, except worse. Plus all those optical waveguide modulators have much more capacitance than a CMOS gate.

Optical ICs need external lasers to provide optical "power supplies", and then have to get rid of all that optical power somehow. One of the more difficult problems is that there's so much scattered light rattling round inside the chip that it's hard to make sure that you can't get errors due to interference between the scatter and the desired signal. Ten watts of laser power going into a 1 cm**2 chip can upset a _lot_ of photodiodes.

Maybe, if there's a way to protect the lasers, and if the I/O is purely optical.

Some years ago, when I was at IBM, my experimental program was aimed at solving some of these problems, using waveguide-coupled optical antennas coupled to metal-insulator-metal (MIM) tunnel junctions. It's a hard technical problem, and the resource allocation problem is also very difficult (as we discovered). ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Well, if you know how to do that, more power to you.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs