"it is now possible to do things in a few days that took people ... decades to achieve".
Let's not get too excited here. Name one thing that can be done in days that used to take decades.
Let's not get too excited here. Name one thing that can be done in days that used to take decades.
"When Steve Johnson visited the University of Waterloo on sabbatical in 1972, he brought B with him. It became popular on the Honeywell machines there, and later spawned Eh and Zed (the Canadian answers to `what follows B?'). When Johnson returned to Bell Labs in 1973, he was disconcerted to find that the language whose seeds he brought to Canada had evolved back home; even his own yacc program had been rewritten in C, by Alan Snyder."
-- Dennis Ritchie, who wrote the first C compiler. http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html
The discussion is about how much effort it is for people to implement things, not computers to run them.