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A grid of rocks in a desert is turing complete. It's not a useful concept for discussing the differences between programming languages, precisely because it's s
by NoodleIncident 7y ago
A grid of rocks in a desert is turing complete. It's not a useful concept for discussing the differences between programming languages, precisely because it's such a low bar.
"Any software problem" includes these two extremely common problems, neither of which has anything to do with Turing completeness:
* It needs to do something fast
* It needs to be written quickly
- pgcj_poster 7y agoI wasn't suggesting that Turing completeness means that all languages are somehow the same. To the contrary, I was arguing that languages are differentiated primarily by how easy they are to use for a particular task—in other words, their accessibility. Execution speed is clearly not the reason why multiple programming languages exist, because assembly is as fast or faster than high-level languages. Rather we use programming languages because they are easy to understand and reason about, allowing us to work quickly, among other things. The usability of a language is impacted by things like whether it has automatic memory management, or whether it uses functions instead of gotos, but also by the vocabulary it uses. Consequently, I see the vocabulary of a language as not particularly different from those other attributes.