Software is driving this change. Gosling reiterated the interdependence of the functions on the airplane, with the fuel metering, navigation, and weather monitoring systems all interconnected. Increasingly, the key to the development of devices lies in the software. For example, when people write software for cell phones, they are mostly not isolated bits of software that sit in the phone. There is a whole system behind them up and down the chain.
Complexity grows radically with the size of the software system.
The dark side of this is the other theorem that says software grows to fill the available hardware. So if the hardware is growing exponentially, the software has to bulk up to fit the space. The key to real-time systems will lie in the response time of the system. We want to be able to get these two systems together and give the programmer the ability to program in these systems cleanly. At a device level, you have a control strategy with some code that controls the device, and typically you have a hundredth of a second for ten objects to participate in the strategy.