«C programmers think memory management is too important to be left to the computer. Lisp programmers think memory management is too important to be left to the user.»
Programming Languages
On Syntax and Semantics, or what Python didn’t get right
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 […]
The life and death of a piece of code
How is code born? What do good developers look for when they write their code? The development of a system can be measured by its trade-offs. Some systems cannot be slow, some others cannot fail, some others cannot be too expensive. All systems want to have everything, obviously. But they cannot, obviously. Before we study […]
On so called low-level and performant languages
Last time, we dug into a new debate: are languages really decoupled from the hardware that runs them? Are the semantics of a language modelling mainstream hardware, and should they? Can we escape to new models of hardware, and new models of semantics? We saw that Backus made a good point arguing that languages have […]
Backus on Von Neumann at the Turing Award
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
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 […]