Re:What made Xerox PARC special? Who else today is like them?
by petra on Friday April 14, 2017 @12:21PM
(#14115333)
Sure, in the small, a few developers working - fully optimizing stuff usually works better.
But on bigger design spaces, when you let hundreds of thousands of people collaborate, create bigger markets faster, and grab more revenue - you enable a much more detailed exploration of the design space.
And often, you discover hidden gold. But also - if you've discovered you've made a terrible mistake in your abstractions - you can often fix that, maybe in the next generation.
To use your example - more modularized technologies are more flexible and can be developed faster, but they no longer use resources efficiently. A modular CPU design makes design process easier, but a particular modular CPU will not outperform a hypothetical "mudball" CPU designed so that each transistor has close-to-optimal utilization (with "optimal" defined by requirements).
Or compare standard coding practices vs. the code demoscene people write for constrained machines, in which a single variable can have 20 meanings, each code line does 10 things in parallel, and sometimes compiled code is itself its own data source.
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The way I see it, building abstractions on top of something is shifting around difficulty distributions in the space of things you could do with that thing.