Python Is So Slow. Can Julia Solve the Two-Language Problem?
As a genre, the “award acceptance lecture” is little more than a formality and a banality. But there is at least one charming exception to this rule—the talks given by the foremost computer scientists on the occasion of their Turing Awards.
Some read like manifestos: John Backus’ “Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?” (1977) inspired a new paradigm that begat functional languages like Haskell. Others are warnings: In his “Reflections on Trusting Trust” (1984), Ken Thompson demonstrated the peril of backdoored compilers, likely preventing scads of security vulnerabilities. Edsger Dijkstra, in “The Humble Programmer” (1972), urged his ilk to be wary of cleverness and acknowledge “the intrinsic limitations of the human mind.”
For our purposes, consider Kenneth Iverson’s heady 1979 lecture, “Notation as a Tool of Thought.” In it, he demonstrated that mathematical notations aren’t just convenient shorthand—CO2 for carbon dioxide,...
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