MOBE2001's Journal: What Computing Should Have Been

The Hidden Nature of Computing

The biggest problem with the universal Turing machine (UTM) is not so much that it cannot be adapted to certain real-world parallel applications but that it hides the true nature of computing. Most students of computer science will recognize that a computer program is, in reality, a behaving machine (BM). That is to say, a program is an automaton that detects changes in its environment and effects changes in it. As such, it belongs in the same class of machines as biological nervous systems and integrated circuits. A basic universal behaving machine (UBM) consists, on the one hand, of a couple of elementary behaving entities (a sensor and an effector) or actors and, on the other, of an environment (a variable).

More complex UBMs consist of arbitrarily large numbers of actors and environmental variables. This computing model, which I have dubbed the behavioral computing model (BCM), is a radical departure from the Turing computing model (TCM). Whereas a UTM is primarily a calculation tool for solving algorithmic problems, a UBM is simply an agent that reacts to one or more environmental stimuli. As seen in the figure below, in order for a UBM to act on and react to its environment, sensors and effectors must be able to communicate with each other.

The main point of this argument is that, even though communication is an essential part of the nature of computing, this is not readily apparent from examining a UTM. Indeed, there are no signaling entities, no signals and no signal pathways on a Turing tape or in computer memory. The reason is that, unlike hardware objects which are directly observable, software entities are virtual and must be logically inferred.

Fateful Choice

Unfortunately for the world, it did not occur to early computer scientists that a program is, at its core, a tightly integrated collection of communicating entities interacting with each other and with their environment. As a result, the computer industry had no choice but to embrace a method of software construction that sees the computer simply as a tool for the execution of instruction sequences. The problem with this approach is that it forces the programmer to explicitly identify and resolve a number of critical communication-related issues that, ideally, should have been implicitly and automatically handled at the system level. The TCM is now so ingrained in the collective mind of the software engineering community that most programmers do not even recognize these issues as having anything to do with either communication or behavior. This would not be such a bad thing except that a programmer cannot possibly be relied upon to resolve all the dependencies of a complex software application during a normal development cycle. Worse, given the inherently messy nature of algorithmic software, there is no guarantee that they can be completely resolved. This is true even if one had an unlimited amount of time to work on it. The end result is that software applications become less predictable and less stable as their complexity increases.

Excerpted from The Silver Bullet: Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It