> And the barriers are far more social, organizational and political than they are technical.
At the core it's even more of an economic barrier which isn't even unique to capitalism.
I recall an article talking about why the Romans didn't invent steam engines and things like railroads considering people were aware that steam could be used to do work. The answer was largely that slave labor was so cheap that nobody really cared about finding more efficiency. It didn't solve any problem they had at the time.
The analogy transfers to the tech industry today, economics tend to drive most decisions. While I love technology and think research and innovation is important for its own sake -- particularly because we might not know what we're missing out on unless we explore -- but those controlling the purse strings have other priorities.
Others might point out that the economic cost of the bugs and failure cases in programming languages without memory safety might actually be greater than the cost of developing alternatives or accepting less performance in exchange for correctness. They're probably right! But unless you can measure it and present it on a spreadsheet to the management class, they won't acknowledge or understand it. It's really difficult to measure "incidents you didn't have". In any case it still might be cheaper to work on the next big startup idea, hype it & sell equity -- that strategy has produced trillion-dollar valuations recently. However correctly or incorrectly that may be, the benefit to an elite few is very real.
At the core it's even more of an economic barrier which isn't even unique to capitalism.
I recall an article talking about why the Romans didn't invent steam engines and things like railroads considering people were aware that steam could be used to do work. The answer was largely that slave labor was so cheap that nobody really cared about finding more efficiency. It didn't solve any problem they had at the time.
The analogy transfers to the tech industry today, economics tend to drive most decisions. While I love technology and think research and innovation is important for its own sake -- particularly because we might not know what we're missing out on unless we explore -- but those controlling the purse strings have other priorities.
Others might point out that the economic cost of the bugs and failure cases in programming languages without memory safety might actually be greater than the cost of developing alternatives or accepting less performance in exchange for correctness. They're probably right! But unless you can measure it and present it on a spreadsheet to the management class, they won't acknowledge or understand it. It's really difficult to measure "incidents you didn't have". In any case it still might be cheaper to work on the next big startup idea, hype it & sell equity -- that strategy has produced trillion-dollar valuations recently. However correctly or incorrectly that may be, the benefit to an elite few is very real.