virtually
Interesting reading about the different generations of programming languages. The word "generation" seems to be used in a different sense here, more about the "closeness" of the programming language to the nuances of the hardware it interacts with and less about chronology. The human mind and the logical architecture of a computer are (as yet) very dissimilar, and between the purest expressions of the two paradigms of "thought," if you will, there exists the spectrum of programming languages. The first-generation languages are more "computer-like," and at the opposite end are the fifth-generation languages, which are tailored more to the way humans solve problems and are thus more abstract, so to speak. Among other things, what’s interesting to me is the way we try to connect the human mind to the capabilities afforded by the technology through the medium of software, but how there’s (or seems to be) little emphasis placed on making the hardware itself perform more "humanly," placing less of a burden of translation on the software. It touches on how little we really understand how we think–the mechanisms and the methods–and how difficult is it to create even a rudimentary machinethat would simulate fundamental processes of the human mind. Oh sure, we can build a computer to beat a human at chess, but that’s a "brute force" approach, with little of the elegance and design evident in the flexibility and versatility of the human mind.
All of this makes me wish I had taken more comp sci courses in college. I took one programming course in high school, actually, in between my junior and senior years, learning Pascal at UNC, but there wasn’t much in the way of theory, which is what really fascinates me. But I suppose knowing the nuts and bolts of programming is important as a foundation for wrapping one’s mind around the theoretical issues–it’s like the currency of the computer world; the concepts provide the vocabulary and common ground to build on in discussion.