Here’s an exercise in separating fundamentals from conventions: if we held a technical summit with all of the galaxy’s advanced alien civilizations, what would we find we had in common, and what would we find inscrutable?
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So, let’s ask: what parts of programming would we have in common? We’d share the mathematical integers, and data structures analogous to Cartesian products (structs) and sums (unions), and functions with side effects, and pure functions as a special case.
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We’d have transactions as a way of running concurrent operations atomically. We’d have most of Knuth’s algorithms in common (maybe they’d have some major breakthroughs we lack!)
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The goal of a high level programming language is to be something that we and these alien civilizations could agree on as universal and principled, and free of quirks and arbitrarity.
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Bitwise ops are an extension of boolean logic / propositional calculus to vectors. If they have similar maths, they are pretty much guaranteed to have these too.
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I think mainly they are just really useful functions that are really cheap to implement, the aliens must have figured that as well.
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I think it would all be moot because our perception of time would likely be totally different resulting in totally impossible communication. So doing the symbolic translation would be maybe impossible. Even on earth event sampling rates vary wildly between species.
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Maybe they don't have Turing machine's though - their computers are built on Church's lambda calculus
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I hope “Aliens” haven’t evolved their PC from a typewriter, but a gaming console. I think it would have been way bettter if Atari/Amiga hardware design lived.
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