[kodz4]

It's quite clear what he is saying. Programming languages are what programmers use. And how programmers think is dominated by how a computer works, which is usually a gigantic distraction to actually solving real world problems.

Newton, Maxwell and Einstein didn't need to waste any of their time thinking about how to use a computer to solve the problems they worked on.

If I ask Google for the 2018 Wimbledon Champ it tells me it has found 47,00,000 results in (0.90 seconds). Take a step back and think about this.

They have their own knowledge graph. They have Wikipedia access. They have the ATP site cached. They have the Wimbledon site cached. But they aren't able to tell the problem being solved doesn't need 4.7 Million results.

This is the kind of mindlessness that happens when the focus is not on the actual problem, but what the computer can do.

[salty_biscuits]

"Newton, Maxwell and Einstein didn't need to waste any of their time thinking about how to use a computer to solve the problems they worked on."

Actually a lost bit of maths history is that computation ability was really important, it was just really manual. Think about Gauss doing least squares to find the orbital parameters of Ceres by hand! Then the stories about him being able to multiply large numbers in his head start to make a bit more sense, not just as a parlor trick.

[mikeash]

I think you make a great point, but that’s a bad example. Google shows the champions in response to that query, separate from the results. They show the results as well because of some combination of inertia and users wanting more info.

[inflatableDodo]

>Newton, Maxwell and Einstein didn't need to waste any of their time thinking about how to use a computer to solve the problems they worked on.

The cursor for the slide rule was invented by Newton.