Well, to be fair, decision-support systems may actually benefit from the coming changes. A lot of that kind of thing is best described in a rule-oriented fashion, and some of the better solutions to the threading problems involve making programming more a matter of automated rule-solving.
So on the one hand, I do think that linear programming is going to become ever more problematic even in that space: people will continue to be more demanding in what those systems do, and current indications are that linear programs are never likely to run much faster than they do now. (Indeed, on the coming chips they may well run slower.) But linear programming may not be the best way to tackle decision-support problems *anyway*, and newer rule-based languages, which *will* scale well, are likely to become a more natural fit to the problem space as they mature.
(And yes, it'll probably take many years for the transition to happen. But we shouldn't forget the lesson of Y2K: when the changes come, they sometimes come with overwhelming speed, and sweep a lot of old code away rather suddenly. So rather than the old COBOL programmers losing their jobs gradually over the course of decades, many of them were put out of work almost overnight as their codebases went away...)
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Date: 2008-07-03 02:58 pm (UTC)So on the one hand, I do think that linear programming is going to become ever more problematic even in that space: people will continue to be more demanding in what those systems do, and current indications are that linear programs are never likely to run much faster than they do now. (Indeed, on the coming chips they may well run slower.) But linear programming may not be the best way to tackle decision-support problems *anyway*, and newer rule-based languages, which *will* scale well, are likely to become a more natural fit to the problem space as they mature.
(And yes, it'll probably take many years for the transition to happen. But we shouldn't forget the lesson of Y2K: when the changes come, they sometimes come with overwhelming speed, and sweep a lot of old code away rather suddenly. So rather than the old COBOL programmers losing their jobs gradually over the course of decades, many of them were put out of work almost overnight as their codebases went away...)