The hundred-year language will be regulated

The hundred-year language will be regulated

If a programming language is as powerful as Paul Graham thinks the hundred-year language could be, it will be regulated. The same way any powerful technology is.

Cory Doctorow’s The Coming War on General Purpose Computing is about crippling the Turing machine itself: a computer that is not allowed to run every program. Graham’s The Hundred-Year Language is about how far a language could go if you designed for a century. He does not mention who would be allowed to have it.

The more power a technology puts in one person’s hands, the harder the attempt to limit it. Functional languages that actually use the full machine would be an early casualty. Turing’s treatment is the omen for the machines.

A general-purpose computer is a Turing machine you are allowed to run. The war Doctorow describes is not on “programming” as a hobby. It is on that permission. Hardware locks, network locks, law: the machine still looks like a computer and it will not run the program you brought.

Graham asks what language we will still want in a hundred years. Power, brevity, a medium for thinking. He does not ask what government, industry or academia would do to a language that actually delivered that. Distortion is a use. Legality is a use. A language that powerful is not a toy. It is treated like the other things that powerful.

Cripple the machine and you do not need to ban the language. You ban the class of programs the language was for. The languages that assume a full Turing machine — the ones that are actually good at saying what a computation is — go first. That is the functional-programming casualty. Not because someone hates lambda. Because the remaining machine is no longer general.

Turing built the model of that machine and then the state that had used him destroyed him for being the wrong kind of person. Chemical castration. Suicide. The record is not subtle. Does that treatment predict a similar fate for one of his greatest creations? Not that the mathematics dies. That the permission to run it does.

The title this post used to wear — just say NO to programming — was a gag. The sentence is: they will say no to the machine.

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