Niklaus Wirth in kako lahko finančno računalništvo pomaga rešiti planet

Niklaus Wirth in kako lahko finančno računalništvo pomaga rešiti planet

Časovni žig: 11. januar 2024 6
Izvorno vozlišče: 3059479

Več kot nekaj svetil na področju računalništva je v zadnjem času žal umrlo, kar ni presenetljivo glede na to, da so številni pionirji iz petdesetih, šestdesetih in sedemdesetih let dočakali konec življenja. Eden, ki mi je padel v oči, je bil
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.

Niklaus Wirth leta 1969

Wirth je bil opazen, ker je kot
wiki stran o njem pravi, da je pomagal oblikovati devet jezikov. To je DEVET jezikov. Seveda ne vse svoje delo! Vpleteni so bili tudi drugi, a to je zelo impresivno.

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.

Wirthova predanost lahkemu, lahko uporabnemu algoritemskemu programiranju je pritegnila moj pogled zaradi rahlo provokativnega komentarja na

objava v družabnem omrežju priljubljenega vplivnega finančnega kvanta/trader/upravitelj portfelja v zvezi z
Wirthov nekrolog v The Register, preprosto je izjavil: »[Članek o Wirthu je bil] pravilen
napihnjen programsko opremo. Poglejte vse, kar proizvaja Microsoft.«

Microsoftov posmeh plakata me je spomnil na nedavni tvit, ki ga je objavil vplivni sodelavec Elona Muska, ki se glasi:

1973:

– Kaj počneš s temi 4KB RAM-a?

– Pošiljanje ljudi na Luno

2019

– Kaj počneš s temi 16 GB RAM-a in 102% CPU

– Excel ima nekje odprto pogovorno okno

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

FinOps bilance stanja. 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
Programski jezik.
A v APL, ki ga je uresničil Morgan Stanley, je kasneje postal K in na koncu 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. Končal bom s citiranjem dveh mislecev, s katerima mislim, da bi se strinjal profesor Wirth:

– 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
težje."

Preveč sodobne programske opreme je slednje.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “Popolnost je dosežena, ne takrat, ko ni več ničesar za dodati, ampak ko ni več ničesar za odvzeti.”  

Nekoliko protislovno v svetu, kjer nove funkcije in nove zmogljivosti spodbujajo inovacije, vendar ima preprostost precejšnje prednosti.

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