>>22
This is a compelling argument, and I still need to think about it more. If I
understand correctly this is more of an argument against something like
standardized performance guarantees rather than standardized semantics and
syntax. So it might be that portability in a smaller sense would still be
virtuous, on the other hand this may be an ad hoc adjustment, which is not a
good sign for the truth value of a theory. Just to invoke a sort of stream of
consciousness this makes me think about sort of paradigm independent
programming like Fortress, and deductive optimisations like reduction
operations on lambda calculus. To what extent can optimisation exist without
referense to hardware, even if we include extremely dramatic deviations in
hardware? There is also this blurry line of how much influence protocols
should have over a language especially if we accept binary protocols, for many
tasks it would likely turn out that simply accepting the common representation
of a protocol would be more efficent than translating into a form which might
be more efficient due to hardware specific optimisations. Homogenous
representations of data structures seems like it would allow for a great deal
of reasoning about performance. This is likely another ad hoc modification
though.