Evolving analog circuitry, and some not-very-related thoughts about compilation

So this thing here is all kinds of cool: given a problem, run a bunch of circuits through SPICE until a solution is found. That is just ... wow.

Weirdly, it kind of dovetails with some notions I was sorting through on my walk today. Modern GUI programs are heavy and use plugins because they tend towards a solution-for-all-problems approach. If I want to reuse the concept of "email", it's easier to write plugins for Thunderbird than start a new email client from scratch - or even a new quasi-email client. Like a workflow client - which is why Thunderbird, and other email clients, tends to spread towards task management, calendars, etc.

But this is because our software technology is primitive. Really, we should be thinking in terms of compiling special-purpose tools and then recompiling when our needs change, which was of course the original approach of Unix back when the world was young and resources scarce.

Resource consumption is serious business. This may be another motivation for semantic-level programming.