> A Turing-complete language is just that, Turing-complete.
It sounds like you're dismissing Turing complete languages as basically the same. I think that's kind of like saying all hardware and networking is just made out of electric circuits. It's true, but it's not illuminating.
> Sorting used to be hard. It used to be novel. It used to be something you could study
Quicksort was created in 1959 [0], Heapsort in 1964 [1]. Mergesort is from 1945 [2]! They were something undergrads were just "expected to know" shortly after that. There have been incremental improvements since then, but these things haven't been novel in a very long time.
I'm sure you won't change your mind, but this doesn't really support your argument above, "Compare programming in the 1970s and 1980s to now. We're way more sophisticated now than we were then."
> B-Trees, A* pathfinding, mapreduce,
Again, 60s and 70s ideas applied on modern hardware. I'll spare you the Wikipedia links for these.
It does support my argument. Unless you want to quibble about exact times and how 1959 isn't "the 70s".
Before 1959, Quicksort was novel. After that, it was something you were expected to know.
Knowledge builds on knowledge. I don't have to invent heapsort. I can just study the implementation. It's now part of the common knowledge we're supposed to have.
And if you think programming is just as sophisticated today as it was in the 70s and 80s, then I don't think there's anything anyone can say to you to convince you otherwise.
And that's kind of the defining feature of being Turing-complete. No language is more or less adept at solving problems as any other as long as they can replicate a Turing machine.
It sounds like you're dismissing Turing complete languages as basically the same. I think that's kind of like saying all hardware and networking is just made out of electric circuits. It's true, but it's not illuminating.
> Sorting used to be hard. It used to be novel. It used to be something you could study
Quicksort was created in 1959 [0], Heapsort in 1964 [1]. Mergesort is from 1945 [2]! They were something undergrads were just "expected to know" shortly after that. There have been incremental improvements since then, but these things haven't been novel in a very long time.
I'm sure you won't change your mind, but this doesn't really support your argument above, "Compare programming in the 1970s and 1980s to now. We're way more sophisticated now than we were then."
> B-Trees, A* pathfinding, mapreduce,
Again, 60s and 70s ideas applied on modern hardware. I'll spare you the Wikipedia links for these.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heapsort
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_sort