Can Programming Be Liberated From The Von Neumann Style? (1977) [pdf]
The answer was &quot;not while computing was getting exponentially better every year&quot;. This sort of improvement curve is really difficult to compete with.<p>It&#x27;s in the process of being liberated now. GPUs are already deployed in many machines with a fundamentally different architecture. And there&#x27;s a bubbling foment of alternatives being developed now.<p>In the end, I don&#x27;t think it was necessarily a case of us getting stuck on &quot;von Neumann&quot; per se... we would have gotten stuck on anything we settled on in the 1960s. And despite familiarity breeding contempt, I&#x27;m not that convinced we could have done that much better in the 1960s. A lot of the alternatives are not <i>universally</i> better, they&#x27;re better in some limited domain but it&#x27;s not obvious that they are going to uniformly beat von Neumann for general computing, even accounting for the fact that &quot;general computing&quot; has coevolved for 50 years with von Neumann.<p>See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12155561" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12155561</a> (which may well have been the inspiration for this submission)