On Syntax and Semantics, or what Python didn’t get right

C vs Python or how Python really adds nothing revolutionary to the field

Some time ago, per­haps even as far as a year ago, I was just start­ing to watch con­fer­ences and lec­tures in my extens­ively use­ful you­tube account, on top­ics like λ‑Calculus or Category Theory, when on a con­fer­ence by Bartosz Milewski on Categories, he threw a bril­liant sen­tence, that speaks some­thing like this: «Humans should­n’t downgrade […]

Backus on Von Neumann at the Turing Award

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?

On a pre­vi­ous post, we talked about Von Neumann’s Turing Complete mod­el for a com­puter. A CPU, some Memory, and I/O. It was beau­ti­ful, but it had its dis­ad­vant­ages, and an unfor­tu­nate leg­acy. Today, John Backus will lead our jour­ney through these mat­ters. Enter Sandman: Backus 32 years later, a thor­ough cri­tique was addressed, ironically, […]

The Von Neumann Architecture, a friend and a foe

First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC - Von Neumann

Von Neumann, anoth­er star from Göttingen, gave the next import­ant step in com­pu­ta­tion after Turing (check­out my pre­vi­ous post for Turing’s first step), in a way that, to this day, you can­’t talk about com­puters without talk­ing about Von Neumann. Which came first: the Hardware, or the Software and Languages? In an ana­log­ous way to […]