Wheels are the most effective way to transport things on land.  So of course it&#x27;s in our best interests to keep improving that wheel.<p>Certainly, language is useful when hashing out a problem on paper (be it pseudocode or math equation or whatever).  The abstraction is convenient.  But programming languages are not a requirement for computers to do their work.  Languages exist for our benefit, not the machine&#x27;s.  One can use software to do work on a computing architecture, or that same algorithm can be implemented in hardware and run a hell of a lot faster.<p>The problem is that, while we can come up with all kinds of algorithms, we can&#x27;t seem to agree on what programming language to use when implementing those algorithms.  I guess I&#x27;m arguing that the languages are getting in the way of the algorithm, and it would be nice if there were a way to achieve something closer to a 1:1 relationship between algorithm and implementation.  We&#x27;re always going to be inventing new programming languages because we can&#x27;t reach a consensus on what is the &#x27;best&#x27; abstraction.  It&#x27;s become ridiculous at this point.<p>Algorithms are currently expressed by programming languages because they have to run on general purpose, programmable von Neumann architectures.  I mean, yeah we could skip the language and just input machine code, but that would of course be ridiculous.  That&#x27;s why we use compilers.<p>If there were an easy way to implement algorithms directly in hardware, why would we bother with programming languages?<p>Take, for example, a supercomputer. If the kinds of work a supercomputer does could be implemented directly in hardware, I think it would be safe to assume that researchers would be all over that.  The gains would be enormous.<p>If there were a hardware-only &#x27;Travelling Salesman&#x27; algorithm that showed astronomical gains in efficiency compared to the conventional software implementation, don&#x27;t you think that would be important and useful?