Sunday, October 29, 2017
Compressed thought
Randomish thought, but maybe a pretty good one....
In building courseware I use a variety of tools for graphics and programming and converting. Some of the tools are EXEs formed in the early years of DOS and Windows, and others are PY scripts written right now to serve immediate needs.
Got thinking about data compression.
Realized that data and code have gone in opposite directions during the history of computing.
Before ~1990, code was compiled into highly compact and efficient form, including ONLY the machine commands actually needed for this program. Data, especially graphic data, was raw and immensely wasteful.
Now we have the opposite. Javascript is written in highly inefficient text form. Every HTML page carries along all the JS code it might possibly need, plus a few megabytes it will never need, all in uncompiled text form. Graphic data is highly compressed.
Are we saving any disk space or memory or CPU time with the new arrangement? I doubt it. 
Labels: Asked and badly answered
¶ 12:31 PM
