[michaelmrose]

Smarter people have expressed more ill considered opinions.

"In the 1950s von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review proposed and ongoing advanced technology projects. One day a week, von Neumann "held court" at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. On one of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted with the Fortran concept; John Backus remembered von Neumann being unimpressed and that he asked, "Why would you want more than machine language?" Frank Beckman, who was also present, recalled that von Neumann dismissed the whole development as "but an application of the idea of Turing's 'short code."' Donald Gilles, one of von Neumann's students at Princeton, and later a faculty member at the University of Illinois, recalled that the graduate students were being "used" to hand-assemble programs into binary for their early machine (probably the IAS machine). He took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about it he was very angry, saying (paraphrased), "It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work.

"https://history.computer.org/pioneers/von-neumann.html

[gizmo686]

The 1950s were a different time. Nowadays computing power is almost too cheap to meter. I do not think anyone at almost any software company knows how to answer the question "how much money are we spending on running our compilers". In most cases, I suspect the cost of running the compiler dominated by the salary of the programmer as he types "make" and waits for the compilation to finish.

We live in a world where every employee has a previously unimaginable amount of processing power dedicated for their personal use that spends almost all of its time idling. That results in a far different calculus than the world where processing power is a scarce resource.

[greenyoda]

If an assembler or compiler could save you from having to run dozens of extra batch jobs to fix a bug in your hard-to-understand machine language code, it might have allowed more time on an expensive machine to be used for productive purposes.

[thatoneuser]

Yet the most prevalent tests these days for SE are based around the old problems. Then again these tests are less about how good of an engineer you are and more of how submissive you are.

[systemBuilder]

That was my dad. He eventually wrote the first Pascal compiler in North America, to tame the pdp-11.

[daveFNbuck]

It's easy to see this as a wrong opinion when computers are extremely cheap and fast. Was von Neumann wrong about computers being more expensive compilation tools than grad students at the time?