Are people excited and interested about the possibilities of things like autonomic computing/amorphous computing and other non- Von Neumann style systems?<p>There seems to be a lack of coverage in geek news, despite a healthy academic community/journal etc and I was wondering why.<p>I've got my own reasons for not being enthused about the current field, but I am curious what other people think.
I, for one, am ridiculously excited by the idea of an entirely new computing paradigm. I know some at HN abhor anything that isn't practical this very second, but I think they just lack imagination. I'd be interested in any articles submitted in the vein of non-traditional computing.
Microcontrollers (e.g., the Atmel AVR chip line which is the basis of the Arduino open source hardware platform) are often modified Harvard architectures, where the instructions are read from flash and SRAM is used for volatile stack/heap memory.<p>There is a lot of activity in this area which has been dubbed "physical computing". See e.g. O'Reilly's Make quarterly and Sparkfun, which apparently does > $10 million in sales annually from selling electronics components and kits to hobbyists. I'm eagerly awaiting my first Arduino starter kit from them! ;)
Oh, of course I'm excited and interested (although not enough to follow it so closely as to be able to guess what you're de-enthused about) but I think it's still a recondite enough area that most HN readers won't know to upvote it.
How about disappointed? I've seen intriguing non-Von architectures for decades, and they always lose out to Moore's Law and the fact that 1,000X more engineering resources are invested in Von Neumann architectures.