Making Reasonable Use of Computer Resources

What if you just mmap it?

Yes, computers are fast, but there's no underlying intention. Our abstractions aren't great, but I think our abstractions let us communicate intention in a way that computers are far far away from achieving.

Show a webpage with "identify all the traffic lights" to a child and, it might take a little while (especially if they can't read!) but the human will build up abstraction and leverage prior knowledge and solve the problem.

Show the same webpage to a supercomputer, and nothing will happen, ever. The supercomputer has access to all of the required information via the internet. Heck, the instructions are right there on the page. But there's no intention of solving the problem.

I guess, I'd say our abstractions do get better over time, but it can take a long time. an obvious example is Aristotle vs Newton vs Einstein. Computers haven't even started down that road. There are some vague ideas, and there has been concrete progress in narrow scopes.

I guess I had a somewhat emotional reaction to the criticism of "programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." Which lead me down a crazy tangent.

Performance matters, but only insofar as it helps people do stuff. But ultimately that's a people problem not a computer problem. The notion that computers are fast doesn't matter very much. We can use them more efficiently if we want to, but do we really want to? Who cares? Maybe it does make sense, maybe it's better to build a new feature.

Anyway, crazy tangent.

I agree wtith the rest of your post there.

> I think our abstractions let us communicate intention in a way that computers are far far away from achieving. > > Show a webpage with "identify all the traffic lights" to a child and, it might take a little while (especially if they can't read!) but the human will build up abstraction and leverage prior knowledge and solve the problem.

Ah. I don't measure progress using computers relative to the human brain. So when I say programmers are using bad abstractions, I am not envious of human pattern recognition etc. at all. Likewise natural language abstractions are messy and culturally loaded and so much more I don't want to get into.

When I say abstractions I am just talking about the rigid formal ones we program.

I think the field is too focused on A.I. stuff because of old romantic notions about human vs computer, piss poor education making programming knowledge scarce, and general laziness among the non-technical powers that be about defining the requirements. I don't think should be the main thread of how we use computers in society.

Jon does a lot of programming streams, and I think anyone who watches his programming streams will recognize that "structure of arrays" is not the default mode that he usually programs in.

That's not even the point of the language.

Yes the language does a lot of what you expect from a modern systems language: structs, explicit memory allocation and management, no header files, etc.

But as far as I can tell, this is just the bare minimum that you should expect from a modern systems language, and the ultimate goal of this language is not to just be that.

The best way I can think of to describe it is collapsing layers into just one: the language and its compiler.

This is why the language has meta programming and code generation built in.

I've seen talks where people boast about how they use a python script to generate a whole lot of C++ code!

I've seen projects written ostensibly in C++ but to build them you need download 10 different tools (including compilers or interpreters for other languages).

Big C++ projects are notorious for being a nightmare to build.

The point of this language is to make it so that you only need one thing: the compiler of this language.

You can write a large system program that builds very quickly and does not need any extra tools to build.

Ultimately even the linker would be deprecated: the compiler would output the executable file directly. But for practical reasons the language has to support linking in order to interop with C libraries.