[nikofeyn]

this is kind of an ironic statement on this forum when von neumann thought programming (outside of directly writing binary) to be a complete waste of time and effort.

in terms of basically being a human computer though, i think he's pretty far up there. although, i do think there's a lot more to being smart than just being a technical person. for example, i would rate noam chomsky to be pretty far up there in terms of smart people. when you hear him speak, he seems to have a photographic memory for damn near everything he has read, which is a ton.

[nabla9]

Turing thought the same same way about programming. For example, he didn't see any point in programming languages.

Basically nobody saw at the beginning that actual computer programming could be very difficult task. You just design algorithms in abstract and some clerk inputs them into the computer in machine language.

"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." – Maurice Wilkes, designer of EDSAC, on programming, 1949

ps. & edit:

Similar thing happened with AI. Dartmouth Workshop in 1956 was the beginning of systematic AI research. Tt was thought that there could be significant progress in in few months and at least during the next year in things like natural language understanding. McCarthy, Minsky, Shannon, etc. had to first discover how hard problems really were.

[cgearhart]

We're still doing that with AI today. Each step forward is seen as signs of imminent acceleration towards AGI, when we really have no idea yet how hard the problems are that lie ahead. It's encouraging to know that it isn't a new phenomenon.

[pmoriarty]

Speaking of photographic memories, von Neumann had one too:

Herman Goldstine wrote "One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how A Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes."

also:

"Von Neumann was reportedly able to memorize the pages of telephone directories. He entertained friends by asking them to randomly call out page numbers; he then recited the names, addresses and numbers therein."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann

[lz400]

I think maybe it's a bit of a notation problem. They seemed to have been talking about programming as just the "writing the code" phase. We all understand programming as the last step in solving a real problem. You have to understand the problem itself, come up with the algorithm, possibly optimize it, etc.

[pmoriarty]

"We all understand programming as the last step in solving a real problem. You have to understand the problem itself, come up with the algorithm, possibly optimize it, etc."

From the waterfall model to agile to test-driven programming and design to worse is better, programming has evolved away from the view that programming was just coming up with an unchanging, almost Platonic, ideal program and merely implementing it, to a much more iterative, exploratory process where code evolves in response to feedback from stakeholders and input from how it's working and meeting needs in the real world.