Once there’s Turing-complete computing, everything else is just program and code optimization.

DannyNiu/NJF

Formation - Collecting Puzzle Pieces

In the beginning, there was

• bits.

We needed integers - then we had

• unsigned integers,
• signed magnitudes,
• one’s complement, and
• two’s complement.

We needed a character encoding set - then we had

• ASCII,
• EBCDIC.

We theorized a model of computing - then we had

• Turing (universal) machine.

We needed a way to specify computing languages - then we had

• Backus-Naur Form based on
• Chomsky’s hierarchy of language grammars.

We needed numbers - we had

• fixed-point and
• floating-point representations;

we needed them to be interoperable, we forgot fixed-point and standardized

• IEEE-754-1985.

Development - Consolidation

We needed a programming environment - then we had

• POSIX (based on Unix),
• etc.

We wanted networking - then we had

• the TCP/IP stack (and its BSD Socket implementation).

We wanted parallel programming - then we had

• threads,
• locks (mutex),
• monitors (condition variables).

We wanted computing to be multi-lingual - then we had

• The Unicode Standard, which includes the essential:
• The Universal Character Set,
• The Unicode Transformation Formats, UTF-8, UTF-16, etc.

More Versatile Programming Paradigms on top of Turing Complete Computing

Improving upon the completeness of Turing (universal) machine, we had:

• Class-Based Object-Oriented Programming
• Template
• Iterator/Generator
• Co-routine
• Lambda Expression
• Functional Programming

Advancement - Active Research

We want numerical calculations to be reproducible - then we had

• IEEE-754-2008, and later
• IEEE-754-2019

We wanted faster memory - then we had

• cache, and later multi-level cache.

We wanted multi-processing - then we had

• dual/quad/octa-core processors,
• GPGPU
• NUMA and other cache architecture.

We envisioned general-purpose lock-free programming - then we had

• atomic operations,

And to make atomic operations efficient on cache architectures, we specified

• explicit memory order for atomic operations,
• explicit non-operation fences with memory order semantics.