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by Tomte 3492 days ago
Yes, the author doesn't know what he's talking about.

But people talking about Turing completeness in a real programming language (usually in the form of "x is Turing complete, therefore you couldn't ask for more") almost always haven't got a clue.
3 comments
waterhouse 3492 days ago
> But people talking about Turing completeness in a real programming language (usually in the form of "x is Turing complete, therefore you couldn't ask for more") almost always haven't got a clue.

There is a fun quote about that...

"There are those who tell us that any choice from among theoretically-equivalent alternatives is merely a question of taste. These are the people who bring up the Strong Church-Turing Thesis in discussions of programming languages meant for use by humans. They are malicious idiots. The only punishment which could stand a chance at reforming these miscreants into decent people would be a year or two at hard labor. And not just any kind of hard labor: specifically, carrying out long division using Roman numerals. A merciful tyrant would give these wretches the option of a firing squad. Those among these criminals against mathematics who prove unrepentant in their final hours would be asked to prove the Turing-equivalence of a spoon to a shovel as they dig their graves."

-- Stanislav Datskovskiy

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hexane360 3492 days ago
I just point them towards Unlambda. Turing completeness in three characters (plus one for output)

http://www.madore.org/~david/programs/unlambda/#what_is

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lokedhs 3491 days ago
Unlambda as a language may be a joke (the funny kind), but learning it is incredibly enlightening, and makes you understand some fundamental concepts of computer science.

As such, I think it represents one of the most enlightening esoteric languages out there together with Brainfuck.

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ant6n 3492 days ago
True. No programming language has infinite tape.
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elsen 3492 days ago
Actually some kinda does:

"Garbage collection is simulating a computer with an infinite amount of memory". https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100809-00/?p=...

We both agree, I'm just using this as a pretext to share this intriguing piece of knowledge. I find the concept much more intuitive than "getting back unused memory".

Especially when you look at the 90% memory usage on your OS, it still make sense with the "infinite memory simulation" definition.

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