In the back of the paper, there's the transcription of a discussion by several people about programming languages. The last comment in the paper is from Strachey, considered one of the fathers of modern, formal semantics for programming languages. His comment is timeless:
One inconvenient thing about a purely imperative language is that you have to specify far too much sequencing. For example, if you wish to do a matrix multiplication, you have to do n^3 multiplications. If you write an ordinary program to do this, you have to specify the exact sequence which they are all to be done. Actually, it doesn't matter in what order you do the multiplications so long as you add them together in the right groups. Thus the ordinary sort of imperative language imposes much too much sequencing, which makes it difficult to rearrange if you want to make things more efficient.There are reasons why Mathworks doesn't use C or a C-based language for the expression of math. So, what's the best way to express hardware?
