Why not? People have a much easier time visualizing a physical machine working on a tape than visualizing something as abstract as lambda-calculus. Also, the Turing machine concept neatly demolishes the “well, that’s great in theory, but it could never be implemented in practice” objections that are so hard to push people past.
Because I am biased to my own preferences for thought. I find visualising the lambda-calculus simpler because Turing Machines rely on storing stupid amounts of information in memory because, you know, it’ll eventually do anything. It just doesn’t feel natural to use a kludgy technically complete machine as the very description of what we consider computationally complete.
Oh, I agree. I thought we were talking about why one concept became better-known than the other, given that this happened before there were actual programmers.
Why not? People have a much easier time visualizing a physical machine working on a tape than visualizing something as abstract as lambda-calculus. Also, the Turing machine concept neatly demolishes the “well, that’s great in theory, but it could never be implemented in practice” objections that are so hard to push people past.
Because I am biased to my own preferences for thought. I find visualising the lambda-calculus simpler because Turing Machines rely on storing stupid amounts of information in memory because, you know, it’ll eventually do anything. It just doesn’t feel natural to use a kludgy technically complete machine as the very description of what we consider computationally complete.
Oh, I agree. I thought we were talking about why one concept became better-known than the other, given that this happened before there were actual programmers.