>> Aren't computers supposed to "program themselves" by now? Anyone 
>> remember that one?
> 
> Well, in a way they do: Think about code optimization.
> 
> The only illusion was about the level of abstraction that could be 
> obtained. I guess the problem there is that natural human language is 
> ill-suited for specifying even the problem to be solved with a computer 
> program (let alone the algorithm to solve it): As soon as precision is 
> required (and with computers that's obviously the case), it quickly gets 
> overly verbose and cumbersome (every scientific paper gives testimony of 
> this fact).

I think what happened is that somebody invented Prolog, and it makes it 
almost seem like the computer is "thinking". It lets the computer solve 
logical problems as if by magic (i.e., it doesn't look like a regular 
algorithm, it looks like real insight). And people thought that in a few 
years' time, somebody would come up with a set of predicates to describe 
the operation of a computer program, you'd put in a mathematical 
description of what the program is supposed to do, and Prolog would 
magically compute the most efficient sequence of machine instructions...

...which would just mean writing programs as mathematical statements 
rather than lists of instructions. It would just be another programming 
language. And, you know, people have argued that programming in Haskell 
is like programming with mathematics, so...

[One might also mention Mathematica.]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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