There is already a lot of mainframe offload. It seems that the middle range of mips is the sweet spot. Taking advantage of the services systems like JBOSS gives is, quite possibly, the last piece in the puzzel.
Whilst I agree with the point that Linux UIs are not great - that has nothing what so ever to do with Linux. Linux knows nothing about the UI layer which is all X11. There is no need to replace the OS to get a better UI.
More to the point - who cares. All these languages are hopelessly slow. If performance matters do it in a performant language like C++, C or FORTRAN. If it does not matter - then it does not matter and so stop going on about it.
You have not been looking at scientific computing. Matlab is more something people used for comp-sci of math. If it was not FORTRAN then it was not scientific computing.
You shoot down our own argument. The video suggest C# and Java as alternatives to interpreted languages. By picking C you are deliberately trying to make your argument sound stronger than it is. The video also mentions the economic cost.
From an economics point of view you are just wrong. Because of the vast numbers of computers used in 'scale out' architectures the impact of code efficiency is enormously bigger than the cost of developers. If a developer's code runs on 10 or 100 machines then you are correct. But modern software runs on hundreds or even hundreds of thousand machines.
The page below shows the media peformance of Python (the fastest in these of PHP/Ruby/Python) as 49.73 times slower than the fastest compiled language. The seems pretty much between 10 and 100 to me.
There are plenty of bench marks showing 10 to 100 times is in the ball part. Computers use masses of power because there are so many of them. As they get more efficient, their numbers increase. The benefit of using faster languages is constant irrespective of the efficiency of the machine on which it is running. How can wasting energy be OK? Even if you don't think it has climate change effects, it has economic and energy security effects - non of them good.
But is that not the point of the post - that all the 'easy and cheep' comes at a huge cost to be planet and eventually to the company. Are C# and Java really that much harder to learn and use?
Actaully - they don't. I spent some time working with Oracle at a major installation where they could not come up with a good enough transactional fail secarios because a single mainframe was being replaced by a multiple DB node distributed system.
Oddly - the project failed...
Just because a large company says they do something - does not mean they actually do. Distributed Transcation as said by RDBMS companies actually is 'Distributed as long as nothing goes wrong'.
I see your point. However, if information transfer is actually infinitely fast then the to physical points become one point in information space and the two generals become one general.
Language gets in the here. But all 'distributed transaction' systems rely on the idea that once every party has agree to commit, it CAN commit. That might not be the case (I have seen it no be so often).
In practice, it is not di±cult to construct an algorithm that, except dur-
ing rare periods of network instability, selects a suitable unique leader among
a majority of nonfaulty acceptors. Transient failure of the leader-selection
algorithm is harmless, violating neither safety nor eventual progress. One
algorithm for leader selection is presented by Aguilera et al. [1]
"
"
The algorithm satisfies Stability because once an RM receives a decision
from a leader, it never changes its view of what value has been chosen
"
Fundamentally, the idea is that the leader is the transactional arbitrator using the RM as the recorder of that transaction.