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> I find this article to be disingenuous. Yes, C isnt "how a computer really works". Neither is assembly. [...] He addresses all of that in the subsequent bull
by fmihaila 8y ago
> I find this article to be disingenuous. Yes, C isnt "how a computer really works". Neither is assembly. [...]
He addresses all of that in the subsequent bullet points of his summary, and elaborates on it in the body of the article (your criticism stops at his first sentence of the summary). It goes into a nuanced discussion; it doesn't just make a blanket statement. I don't find it disingenuous at all.
- steveklabnik 8y agoThank you.
- dublin 8y ago"How a computer works" is both a moving target, and largely irrelevant, as shown by the number of ignorant (not stupid) replies in this very topic. RISC and ARM changed the game in the 90s, just as GP-GPUs did in the 00s and neural and quantum hardware will do in the future. What's really needed are languages that make it easier to express what you want to accomplish - this is still a huge problem, as evidenced by the fact that even a simple data munging task can be easily explained to people in a few dozen words, but may require hundreds of LOC to convey to the machine... (BTW, it's time for us to be able to assume that the computer and/or language can do base-10 arithmetic either directly or via emulation. The reasons for exposing binary in our programming languages became irrelevant decades ago - ordinary programmers should never have to care about how FP operations screw up their math, it should just work.)