That's one philosophy. Your code exists to be run by your computer.
Personally, I take a different one: the computer exists to run my code. LLVM, x86, ARM... all just implementation details. Sometimes they're unavoidable, but c'est la vie.
Ultimately, what I care about is semantics. I care about what my program means--the logic it represents. After all, that's the whole point, the end goal. The fact that it's running on a physical computer is just a detail, albeit an important one.
A programming language is more about shaping my thoughts and forming my logic than actually running. Choosing a programming language is incredibly important--it affects what I can say, how I can say it and even how I think. And that's the most important part.
> What is a program? Several answers are possible. We can view the program as what turns the general-purpose computer into a special-purpose symbol manipulator, and does so without the need to change a single wire (This was an enormous improvement over machines with problem-dependent wiring panels.) I prefer to describe it the other way round: the program is an abstract symbol manipulator, which can be turned into a concrete one by supplying a computer to it. After all, it is no longer the purpose of programs to instruct our machines; these days, it is the purpose of machines to execute our programs.
The end goal of the web browser in which I'm typing this is not to represent some piece of abstract logic, but to drive the physical hardware: to change the color of pixels on my screen, to sense and react to my input. Attempt to distill it to some piece of logic or mathematics, and you end up with something useless, an absurdity.
The original task was "apply a seasonal rebate to our products," but none of the programs actually accomplished this feat. They contained some logic which might be useful in such a program, but none of them applied anything. Logic on its own is sterile.
I thought the end goal is to display the page. I would say that "to change the color of pixels on my screen, to sense and react to my input" is a means to an end, not "the end goal".
This was a really neat discussion to watch. Devotional vs Observational semantics.
When I'm in my algorithms class and we have a code snippet to find a minimum spanning tree, we don't even have some machine to compile it down to, but because we have denoted some meaning to bit of the program, we can even prove that the meaning of the entire program is to output the MST.
Changing pixels on the screen (usually?) only matters because it let's us get at the results of the program. Even if the program is a video decoder + video, I don't care about pixels, I care about the picture. Pixels are just more implementation details.
Personally, I take a different one: the computer exists to run my code. LLVM, x86, ARM... all just implementation details. Sometimes they're unavoidable, but c'est la vie.
Ultimately, what I care about is semantics. I care about what my program means--the logic it represents. After all, that's the whole point, the end goal. The fact that it's running on a physical computer is just a detail, albeit an important one.
A programming language is more about shaping my thoughts and forming my logic than actually running. Choosing a programming language is incredibly important--it affects what I can say, how I can say it and even how I think. And that's the most important part.