Comment Re:Long overdue (Score 1) 415
I cannot blame you for not seeing it. I studied the theories for five years and thought them dull and boring. Then, after decades of having to work on real world problems, it hit me. Nowadays i can e.g. look at code or database designs and easily recognise coders who have understood the theories and those who didn't.
Not understanding the theoretical background will put and upper limit to anyones capabilities as a coder. This is like being restricted in World of Warcraft to Level 20: some skills in the skill tree will remain out of reach no matter the grinding.
The best way to illustrate the genius of Turing is: he saw computers coming before the first one ever being built. He developed a trivial "assembler language" (Turing machine) that is so powerfull that no computer and no programming language built today can compute something his machine could not.
When he was finished with that, he thought not about calculations (as the opposite German genius Konrad Zuse did) but of processing symbols. He thought of computer code being processed by computer code and thereby inventing compilers and interpreters without having a name for it yet.
Then he interpolated the capabilities of those (not yet existing) machines and recognised that they would appear to have some kind of artificial intelligence and started thinking about how to tell computers and humans apart (60 years before the first SPAM was sent).
Looking back, having all the tools already on your fingertips, all this may sound trivial. But to achieve only 1% of his visionary power, i would have to grow by several orders of magnitude.