...it's all just smoke and mirrors? Ultimately, any program running in 99% of the computers out there today is running the old fetch-execute cycle on a Von Neuman architecture: A processor fetches the next instruction, executes it, stores the result, and goes to the next instruction. Atop that, we've layered: Subroutines, Modules, Functional Programming, Structured Programming, Object-Orientation (Objects, Inheritance, Polymorphism, Composition/Aggregation), Closures, Atoms, Processes, Multithreading, Semaphores, etc. We're desperately trying to make the digital computer be more than the sum of its parts, just as a living human brain is somehow more than a collection of neurons and synapses. We *desperately* want abstractions...need them, in fact. That's the whole point of the progression from bare binary programming, through assembly, to high-level languages, etc.--abstraction. The speed and capacity of computers grows. The speed and capacity of the minds of progra...
I can't quite articulate the point, but I was thinking this morning that all the bailing out is analogous to preventing even the small fires in the forest.
ReplyDeleteWithout some sort of "controlled burn" on these bad loans, it feels like we're leaving dead timber around to make the next crisis even more severe.