Niklaus Wirth și modul în care calculul financiar poate ajuta la salvarea planetei

Mai mult de câțiva oameni de lumini ai informaticii au trecut cu tristețe în ultimul timp, ceea ce nu este surprinzător, având în vedere că mulți pionieri din anii cincizeci, șaizeci și șaptezeci ajung la sfârșitul vieții. Unul care mi-a atras atenția a fost
Niklaus Wirth who departed this world on New Year’s Day. He was a Swiss computer scientist, associated most with ETH Zurich, but he also had sixties Silicon Valley pedigree. He obtained
his PhD at the highly regarded  Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Berkeley, and then became Associate Professor in Computer Science at Stanford for a time.

Wirth a fost notabilă pentru că, ca și
pagina wiki despre el spune că a ajutat la proiectarea a nouă limbi. Sunt NOUĂ limbi. Desigur, nu toată munca lui! Alții au fost implicați, dar asta este foarte impresionant.

The first of two languages of Wirth that I have most familiarity with includes ALGOL from the 1960s, though in his case specifically the W variant which brought complex datatypes and dynamic and recursive data structures such as lists, trees and graphs to
ALGOL’s scalars and arrays. The W is important, because ALGOL W got supplanted by the more complicated and ultimately unsuccessful rival ALGOL 68 implementation. However, Wirth’s ALGOL W descendent, the Pascal programming language and ultimately the commercially
supported Delphi (built on an object-oriented version of Pascal), became highly successful algorithmic languages during the 1970s.

A fost dedicarea lui Wirth pentru programarea algoritmică ușoară, ușor de utilizat, ceea ce mi-a atras atenția datorită unui comentariu ușor provocator asupra unui

postare pe rețelele sociale de la un influent popular cuant financiar/trader/manager de portofoliu referitor la
Necrologul lui Wirth în The Register, El a declarat pur și simplu „[Articolul despre Wirth a fost] corect
umflat software. Uită-te la orice produs de Microsoft.”

Afișul Microsoft al afișului mi-a amintit de un tweet recent postat de la un influencer asociat al lui Elon Musk, care spunea:

1973:

–          Ce faci cu acei 4KB de RAM?

–          Trimiterea oamenilor pe lună

2019

–          Ce faci cu acei 16 GB de RAM și 102% CPU

–          Excel are o casetă de dialog deschisă undeva

Now, Microsoft are getting an unnecessarily rough ride by these commentators, though they’re big enough to take it, because in my view “bloat” is a common feature of 20th Century computing. For example, look at the virtual machines and sizeable memory/CPU
requirements of popular languages Java and Python. As applications in these and other languages modernize and scale to cloud, the bloated software becomes bloated

Bilanțurile FinOps. The addiction then escalates by an order of magnitude when Generative AI adds to the mix, with its massive compute overheads. Key training and inference processes require powerful specialized hardware, GPUs, which are getting scarcer
and more problematic to source.

Therefore, in addition to escalating costs from inefficient use of memory and compute, particularly but not exclusively for data intensive applications, draws excess energy consumption, and creates environmental impact. Geopolitical tensions might also
arise as powerful nations and economies compete for compute, such as those at play in the South China Sea, relating to the strategic importance of TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).  

Here’s where Wirth and the finance industry comes into play. Pascal and Delphi were well utilized in financial services (note the Swiss connection!), as were other lightweight “terse” languages, while the 1970s engineers built their hyper-efficient rocket
science. Another language in which Wirth had a hand was the vector language APL, designed by Canadian Kenneth Iverson. Wirth was academic supervisor of the “interpreter for Iverson Notation,” a fundamental part of APL, aka
Un limbaj de programare.
A în APL, realizat de Morgan Stanley, va deveni mai târziu K și în cele din urmă Q, When you see live trading prices and real-time analytics from your banks and brokers, particularly
in equities, FX and other high frequency assets, such are the languages used, lightweight, terse and very efficient.  

This matters because as we tackle the bloat problem of the software that runs the world, including the new algorithms of GenAI, it is to these types of concise, tight languages and libraries, practised and proven in finance, to which data centers, Cloud
Service Providers (CSPs), and many others will turn.

RIP Niklaus Wirth. Voi încheia prin a cita doi gânditori cu care cred că profesorul Wirth ar fi fost de acord:

– C.A.R. Hoare, “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far
mai dificil."

Prea mult din software-ul modern este cel din urmă.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery: „Se atinge perfecțiunea, nu atunci când nu mai este nimic de adăugat, ci când nu mai este nimic de luat.”  

Oarecum contraintuitiv într-o lume în care noile funcții și noile capabilități stimulează inovația, dar simplitatea are beneficii considerabile.

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• Sursa: https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/25519/niklaus-wirth-and-how-financial-computing-can-help-save-the-planet?utm_medium=rssfinextra&utm_source=finextrablogs