Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

proteins also have a half-life, much like RNA. But it tends to be longer.

Of specific species:

Interestingly, the very first programming language with an actual implementation was interpreted: Short Code in 1950.

This is not surprising, as interpreters are easier to write than compilers.

And just like modern scripting languages, it reduced execution speed by about 50x.

These people are heroes. There's nothing else to say.

It basically replaces a bunch of discrete digital components with a single chip. So you don't have to wire things manually.

Particularly fundamental if you would be putting those chips up a thousand cell towers for signal processing, and ever felt the need to reprogram them! Resoldering would be fun, would it? So you just do a over the wire update of everything.

Vs a microcontroller: same reason why you would want to use discrete components: speed. Especially when you want to do a bunch of things in parallel fast.

One limitation is that it only handles digital electronics: electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/25525/are-there-any-analog-fpgas There are some analog analogs, but they are much more restricted due to signal loss, which is exactly what digital electronics is very good at mitigating.