Lamport: "The Future of Computing: Logic or Biology?"



"We understand automobiles. There are no homeopathic automobile repair shops, that try to repair your car by putting inﬁnitesimal dilutions of rust in the gas tank. There are no automotive faith healers, who lay their hands on the hood and pray. People reserve such superstitions for things that they don’t understand very well, such as the human body... ... Superstitions arise because we don’t understand. If this trend continues, we may soon see homeopathic computer repair. Perhaps it will consist of adding a virus to a program, deleting the virus, and then running the program. You may soon be able to take your laptop to a faith healer, who will lay his hands on the keyboard and pray for the recovery of the operating system. Is this the future of computing? Or can we instead build on the idea that a computer program is a mathematical object that can be understood through logic?"