Something occurred to me today while reading a Seattle Post Intelligencer article about how Pixar uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing solution for rendering its incredibly complex Renderman movie images: Could the availability of extreme computing resources like Azure lead to lazy, less-than-economical programming patterns?
Ie, would programmers be less likely to write highly productive code if less productive, less sophisticated code would yield the same result, given the availability of tons of hardware? And what would this mean in terms of energy conservation, and more importantly, the advancement of human thought?
Put another way, there are many ways to perform a certain computational algorithm, all yielding an accurate result, but all requiring various levels of computational intensity. I’ll give an example. First, the bubble sort. This is a very simple, iterative method of sorting data into ordered lists–a method taught in basic computer programming classes. I first learned the bubble sort while taking Pascal at Cass Tech high school in Detroit. I thought the bubble sort was awesome, although I later learned that there were other sorting schemes that were far faster and less computationally intense, ie. more economical.
So the hypothesis is this: innovation in more effective programming is lessened by the availability of horsepower.
