Re:In the Defense of Spaghetti Code (2013)
by kjeetgill on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @02:42AM
(#20504905)
Huh. I made the comment about Turing Completeness being "low-bar" from the perspective of Turing tarpits [0] or NAND universality (which needs memory/flip-flops). It seems to be easy enough that languages like Brainfuck can be Turing complete with a handful of elements. So much so that C++ templates or extended regexs seem to accidentally be found to be Turning Complete.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
> In any Turing complete language, it is possible to write any computer program, so in a very rigorous sense nearly all programming languages are equally capable.
You seem to have more history on the matter than I do, so let me ask a question instead trying to defend that idea. Why did anyone think Structured Programming wouldn't be? They must have had reasons to suspect it. I also don't know much of the history of Structured Programming apart from "Goto Considered Harmful", so pointers would be great.
Re:In the Defense of Spaghetti Code (2013)
by mannykannot on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @08:29AM
(#20506178)
I don't think those programmers, who claimed that structured code was insufficient, had thought about it in those terms. They were probably proud of their skills and the programs they wrote, and tried to defend it as the right way to do things, as it seemed obvious to them, from their experience, that it was.
And I'm just pointing out that in this particular case, Turing completeness was very useful in decisively stopping what would have otherwise been an unending and inconclusive argument, and, regardless of whether or not it can justifiably be called a low bar, it was good enough in this case. Furthermore, It does the same in many other cases: for example, in the question of whether there are ISAs that are more computationally powerful than others. It seems to be, or at least have been, very useful in computer science even if it does not have much relevance to everyday coding, and it may not seem much of a big deal because the questions that it has solved are no longer (or never became) problems.