...it's all just smoke and mirrors? Ultimately, any program running in 99% of the computers out there today is running the old fetch-execute cycle on a Von Neuman architecture: A processor fetches the next instruction, executes it, stores the result, and goes to the next instruction. Atop that, we've layered: Subroutines, Modules, Functional Programming, Structured Programming, Object-Orientation (Objects, Inheritance, Polymorphism, Composition/Aggregation), Closures, Atoms, Processes, Multithreading, Semaphores, etc. We're desperately trying to make the digital computer be more than the sum of its parts, just as a living human brain is somehow more than a collection of neurons and synapses. We *desperately* want abstractions...need them, in fact. That's the whole point of the progression from bare binary programming, through assembly, to high-level languages, etc.--abstraction. The speed and capacity of computers grows. The speed and capacity of the minds of progra...
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