[Chicago] Question about Machine Language.

[Naomi Ceder]

My answer would be, "Because machine language is much slower to write, and
harder to write without bugs, and developer time is precious."

I'm sure others on this list could expand in many directions.

Cheers,
Naomi

On 7 December 2015 at 15:04, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:

> Thanks for the correction Naomi, but that didn't really answer my
> question.  Why don't we all just study machine language and that's it?
>
> On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 2:10 PM, Naomi Ceder <naomi.ceder at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 7 December 2015 at 13:57, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> I was reading an article on the web about how all programming languages
>>> are "Turing complete".  I believe that basically means that all programming
>>> languages are able to communicate with the computer's CPU using the binary
>>> codes of machine language.
>>>
>>
>> Uh, that's not actually what "Turing Complete" means...  It doesn't  have
>> anything to do with binary or machine language... from Wikipedia (
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness):
>>
>> "To show that something is Turing complete, it is enough to show that it
>> can be used to simulate some Turing complete system. For example, an imperative
>> language <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_language> is Turing
>> complete if it has conditional branching
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_branching> (*e.g.*, "if" and
>> "goto" statements, or a "branch if zero" instruction. See OISC
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer>) and the
>> ability to change an arbitrary amount ofmemory
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_memory> locations (*e.g.*, the
>> ability to maintain an arbitrary number of variables). Since this is almost
>> always the case, most (if not all) imperative languages are Turing complete
>> if the limitations of finite memory are ignored."
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Naomi
>>
>> Okay then.... so why don't we get rid of C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby,
>>> Perl, Ocaml, Haskell, C#, F#, etc, etc and why don't we call just code in
>>> machine language?  Bear in mind that I'm asking this question from the
>>> point of view of the Devil's Advocate because I know almost nothing about
>>> machine language.  But it's an interesting question.  It's related to the
>>> question, "Why don't we have one universal natural language?  Let's get rid
>>> of English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic,
>>> Hebrew, etc, etc, and replace them all with one universal language that
>>> everyone understands".
>>>
>>> I'm interested in reading your thoughts and ideas.  Thanks.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Douglas.
>>>
>>> P.S.  Sorry to hear about the Django Study Group.  I thought Mark Graves
>>> was very friendly and did a great job of demonstrating various web
>>> applications using Python.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Naomi Ceder
>> https://plus.google.com/u/0/111396744045017339164/about
>>
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>>
>
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-- 
Naomi Ceder
https://plus.google.com/u/0/111396744045017339164/about
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