Language wars
Posted Dec 11, 2008 12:55 UTC (Thu) by
ncm (subscriber, #165)
In reply to:
Interview: Vernor Vinge by NRArnot
Parent article:
Interview: Vernor Vinge
Sorry, but Python, in this context, is a motorcycle. It's more fun than a semi truck, and more versatile, but as handy as it is, Python does not now, and never will, carry industrial freight. Yes, a dirt bike could pull a trailer, but not well, and attaching a trailer misses the point of the dirt bike. Incidentally, Lisp is an ornithopter.
Getting back on topic, the interstellar transport might be a language designed to program (or coax?) arrays of quantum processors, but that's as far off as real interstellar transports. We have at least three architectural generations before we get there. Probably it won't be recognizable as a language at all, and the problems it solves would not even be recognizable to us as problems that computation could address.
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