This is a question disguised as a statement. I don’t know how to phrase this as a question. I would be most interested in receiving comments.
At the beginning of time, there was Electrical Engineering, which dealt with analogue signals. Someone discovered that when the signals were slammed into the rails - +ve and ground - the circuits could be treated and analyzed as digital quantities consisting of 1’s (maximum +ve) and 0’s (ground).
It was discovered that that these “digital circuits” had properties that could be more easily analyzed and combined, e.g de Morgan’s Laws.
Then, we (the “royal we”) crossed the Great Divide and discovered “opcodes” - API’s that allowed us to build complicated electronic circuits by writing short scripts of opcode sequences that produced electrical effects which could be translated into physical effects. We discovered ways to create such scripts, and have spent the last half of the century refining ways to program and reprogram such scripts, using old-fashioned ideas like “programming languages” and “operating systems”.
All of this resulted in a spin-off called “Computer Science”.
IMO, “Computer Science” is incrementally pushing at an asymptote. There’s only so much that we can do with this branch of thinking.
I think that we’ve discovered a bunch of interesting doo-dads, like garbage collection, 1st-class functions, etc. that should allow us to spin-off a new discipline.
Do we need new kinds of opcodes built upon the PLs and OSs of today?
We’ve pushed the Functional paradigm to the point that we now have LLMs. LLMs, though, are the anti-thesis of Engineering, due to their propensity to “hallucinate”. We need something that we can control and engineer.
We’ve pushed the Functional paradigm to the the point that we now have the internet. It is obvious - at least to me - that functional thinking is not suited for asynchronous, internet-y thinking. We need some new way of thinking about internet-y kinds of issues.
Can we use the Python’s and Odin’s and Rust’s of today as the opcodes of tomorrow?
See Also
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