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Comment by cwillu | Hacker News Reader

Computing is an endless cycle of inventing ways to isolate code in a private machine, followed by inventing ways to make it easier for those machines to interoperate.

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Absolute. I feel like society goes through changes in a similar cyclic way. We, as humans, basically have a finite span of understanding and attention, and so, basically create cycles that are longer than that.

Don't forget an endless cycle of inventing ways to make debugging and problem solving harder by adding isolation boundaries and complexity :)

Debugging Docker-anything makes me want to go into drywall, I swear.

Better than going into brick walls I guess

> inventing ways to isolate code in a private machine

Reminds me of how Alan Kay described OOP as communicating objects, where each object is a kind of computer.

"I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages."

I keep wondering where we would be now if we had not spent a decade or two eagerly running down that lane, before reassessing the be all end all solution nature OOP promised encapsulation to be. Perhaps not as far as we are after doing the meandering that we did, I think OOP has contributed a lot to the post-OOP world we live in now. It's not gone, it has just been demoted from ideology to tool.

We could argue that we've down the agents road since the microservices craziness. But this one backfired visibly and very soon and most people noped out of it in a blink.

The OOP humanity is so heavily invested on has very little relation to that vision on the GP.

You mean Services Oriented Architectures, or Common Object Request Broker Architecture, or maybe Distributed Computing Environment?

It is like the endless cycle of "microservices" since distributed computing was invented, after computer networks came to be.

This is a really interesting way to think about the progression.

As a timeline I like to plot the ratio of users to isolated compute. We've moved along points like users per building, users per room, user per computer, computers per user, kernels per user, processes per user.

Containers enabled the latest shift.

At least it doesn't halt

That's a wise statement.

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