Criticizing Computers

One of the greatest programmers in history, who did indeed understand every component of the computer from the software down to the chip, Niklaus Wirth, wrote “the belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail

Do you ever get really mad at your computer? Are you frustrated by how everything works these days? Do you get angry not knowing who to complain to when programs or applications break down? Well, you’re certainly not the only one.

If, as the brilliant mathematician Edsger Dijkstra said, “computing is about controlling complexity,” then the body of work produced by the computer industry’s programmers has entirely failed.

Today, memory is not an issue! We have more memory than we know what to do with. Rather than natural selection, we have a regime of hoarding. All the bad code can live on to torment and confuse the programmers of the future.

“In Hollywood, they have it down to a system. They determine who directs. In the computer world, everyone wants to design software, but they don’t call it creative control. In software, it’s the same issue as in Hollywood, but nobody recognizes it. And that’s partly because interactive software is really a kind of movie. What is a movie? A movie is

There already exists a programming philosophy with ideas on how to tame entropy and ensure that computers  actually  control complexity, instead of increase it. Those ideas are summarized in the Unix philosophy, which I’ve added below for convenience:

1. Write programs that do one thing and do it well.


2. Write programs to work together

We were warned about this. We were warned about the dangers of too much complexity, but we didn’t care. Now, rather than understanding how the thing works and what to do to fix it, we basically cross our fingers anytime we boot up our computer or open an app. These criticisms aren’t original to me, I am just a messenger.