The End of Programming Languages?

The other day, I saw a headline that says “The end of programming languages…” Or something like that. You get the gist.

The article is about how programming languages are no longer useful in the era of quantum computing. And it goes on to talk about why the von Neumann architecture will be gone. Soon? Soonish? When we have quantum computing and some AI thingy that I don’t exactly understand very well.

So, let’s look at what programming languages exactly are.

Why did we even have programming languages? Well, in the beginning, machine code was all we had to program the “computer”. I have it in quotes because they might really be what we would consider as computers now. They were very specialised and did one or a few things only, things that they designed into the machine itself. So, the “machine code” was really there to provide some flexibilities. These are not general purpose computers.

When computers that were built for numeric calculations came out, still not really general purpose, they needed a way to make it easier to put in formulas. This is a very simplistic and shortened history, obviously. There are tons of books on the history of computing. But the point is this: the first programming languages, if you can call them that, were there to provide a short-hand, sort of, for formulas. And it is not a coincidence that the first language that we can actually call a proper programming language is called FORTRAN, for formula translation.

So, after that, what did we have. Well, Algol in 1958, LISP in 1960. And after that, we have a boom time for languages the whole 1960’s and 1970’s. They were talking about the next 500 programming languages. Still, ultimately the programs written in all of these languages get translated into machine code, directly or indirectly. Or you can’t execute the programs. If you look at the whole graph of all the programming languages ever designed, it is all over the place. It is not a tree. It is definitely not linear, and I don’t care how you define linearity. It is a weird kind of a graph. A rhizome. Much more than a graph.

So, when we have quantum computing, do we still need programming languages? Hell yes. Are they like what we have right now? In some ways, yes. In some ways no. Why? Because computability exists. That is why. How you get to Turing complete is your business. But you will have to get to Turing complete.

How about the von Neumann architecture? Well, this is the thing. The base layer of a computer is usually not very interesting. What is above is more interesting. The fact that your wooden table is mostly consist of carbon, oxygen, whatever else, atoms, is not interesting. If you are talking about how good a table is. The properties of wood that allow you to have a table are. The von Neumann architecture was just one of the ways that computing can be done. It is not the holy grail, do not worship it. And since you don’t really need to worship it, you don’t really need to demolish it and claim to be a god killer either.

So, will we have programs when we have quantum computing? Yes, because the definition of a program is some code that instructs the computer what to do. If it is English, then the program is in English. “Tea. Earl Grey, Hot” is a program. Although the Computer obviously was not much of a natural language processor.

What architecture the computer is based on is actually not important. If there is a new architecture, as quantum computers will definitely be having a different kind of architecture, sure. But if you want the thing to have a website, it still needs to know TCP/IP or whatever protocols that will be mandatory at that time. Oh, no protocols are needed? Yeah, sure, you know absolutely nothing about communication then. In English, okay, you still need a way to ensure both ends know what each other is talking about. That is the definition of a protocol. Using brain waves, you still need a protocol so that semantics can be established and agreed upon.

Can we have AI that can write programs as well as humans? Like I said in a different article, you actually don’t want that. What you want is a computer that runs its own code without having to write programs. Program code is meant for humans. The intention of the program is for the computer. If the computer knows what to do, it should just do it, without going through the process of writing a program. There is no need for a middleman if you are the computer itself and you know what you should do or need to do or want to do with no external intervention.

I felt like commenting on that article but it would take a long comment. Way too long for any of us to read in a tiny comment box. But fewer people will be reading this article. Yes, unfortunately.