Ah, it was a late night quip with the intention of undermining the article. Yes, computers are fast, but there's no underlying intention. Our abstractions aren

Ah, it was a late night quip with the intention of undermining the article. Yes, computers are fast, but there's no underlying intention. Our abstractions aren't great, but I think our abstractions let us communicate intention in a way that computers are far far away from achieving. Show a webpage with "identify all the traffic lights" to a child and, it might take a little while (especially if they can't read!) but the human will build up abstraction and leverage prior knowledge and solve the problem. Show the same webpage to a supercomputer, and nothing will happen, ever. The supercomputer has access to all of the required information via the internet. Heck, the instructions are right there on the page. But there's no intention of solving the problem. I guess, I'd say our abstractions do get better over time, but it can take a long time. an obvious example is Aristotle vs Newton vs Einstein. Computers haven't even started down that road. There are some vague ideas, and there has been concrete progress in narrow scopes. I guess I had a somewhat emotional reaction to the criticism of "programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." Which lead me down a crazy tangent. Performance matters, but only insofar as it helps people do stuff. But ultimately that's a people problem not a computer problem. The notion that computers are fast doesn't matter very much. We can use them more efficiently if we want to, but do we really want to? Who cares? Maybe it does make sense, maybe it's better to build a new feature. Anyway, crazy tangent.