> But the view that PL research and ideas are all about denying the underlying machine seems to be an overplayed meme. Well I am not terribly hip to what's "pl

> But the view that PL research and ideas are all about denying the underlying machine seems to be an overplayed meme. Well I am not terribly hip to what's "played out," but I don't intend to disparage academic research. What I am concerned with is the idea that you can't have mathematical reasoning and correct programs in the absence of a VM and some combination of denotational semantics and program invariants and other features-du-jour. The trade-offs for "expressivity," are not zero and we throw them out rather casually these days. Other trade-offs such as "correctness" also have a cost and non-trivial trade offs for compile times, run-time support, etc. And it makes reasoning about these characteristics more difficult the more abstract Flub is from a real machine. > Jonathan Blows Jai language also has some ideas about being able to easily change between SoA and AoS. His work is pretty cool and I have been following it from a distance. The paper you linked to looks interesting. I wish I was an ACM member so I could read it!