Maybe it's telling you it's a hard problem?

My comment was a bit tongue in cheek. Obviously it is a hard problem. But in a profession where we work with machines that literally were made to crunch numbers, and where abstraction is something we deal with daily, why can’t we have a performant abstraction for doing arbitrary calculations? The answer is that to be performant it must be solved in hardware, which would cost more than the hardware we have.

So in fact it is not just telling me it’s a hard problem, it’s telling me that the cost-benefit is still not there. It’s like it’s just not a very important problem (in an economic sense). And that is what surprises me, given that computers were made to do arbitrary calculations.

	▲	akkartik 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This article has been deeply influential for me: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-... I used to imagine for someone in construction a wall must be some really simple thing. But it's only simple after millennia of building walls. So I now have lots of grace and patience for humanity to figure out numbers in computers, whether integers or reals. Your explanation is possibly the same just in different words. It's a hard problem and probably needs a whole lifetime. But it's in no single person's economic interest to devote to it the time it needs (not to mention the diverse skills required; once one has a solution one has to pitch it to the world). And so it will happen over a hundred lifetimes.