Once I was watching a famous system engineer giving a presentation on the lack of communication between hardware and software people. I found his views quite interesting, that software people close themselves up in the abstractions of skys, while hardware people get lost in their fights with physical variations.
Now, I just came across a very interesting discussions in a newsgroup dating from 1993 (in comp.lang.functional under functional vs. imperative languages). Just reflects the difficulty we have with change....
I think that part of the answer is that SP
(software people) are trained different than HP (hardware
people). HP tend to consider themselves engineers and see
part of their job as being able to do cost/benefit anaylsis of
hardware technologies. There is very little resistence to
changing technologies for HP. SP on the other hand tend not
to pay attention to different SW technologies at all and are
typically not trained to evaluate different technologies. As
a result, very few SP are readily able to change to different
technologies. Some people could have learned COBOL+MVS or
C+Unix, been bottled in 1963, opened up today, and not see
much of a difference--but a lot of technological development
in SW technologies has taken place in the last 20 years! If
I were a HP I would be very nervous about using a 20 year old
technology to compete in todays market place.
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