Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Code vs Data (Metaprogramming) - Computerphile" video.

  1. 5:37 Assuming the increment of i lies at the bottom of that squiggle somewhere ... otherwise you’ve just written an endless loop.
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  2. Von Neumann understood this perfectly well. The only ones who have forgotten tend to use languages like Java or C#. Oh, and PHP.
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  3. 4:23 That’s what a compiler for a high-level language does. The original name for this concept, from the 1950s, was “automatic programming”. At that time, the high-level language source was not considered the “program”: that name was reserved for the actual machine code that the computer could interpret.
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  4. 4:16 But watch out for the security implications of this, if the code you generate was based on input from a potentially malicious user. Unfortunately, I think this is the fatal flaw in the whole concept. This is why it is better to build your own interpreter on top of the base language -- as you could, for example, in Python -- and then generate code for this interpreter from the data. That way you get more control over what exactly the code can do.
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  5. Code is just data to a lower-level processor. What is the lowest-level processor? Is it the laws of physics?
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  6. YouTube just showed me a 24-minute ad--that’s over three times longer than the video I wanted to watch. Never mind--I just let it play with the tab muted, while I did something else. That way you still get the ad revenue, right?
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