In this talk I will retell the story by Maarten van Emden and Gauthier van den Hove: how the Amsterdam Plot, committed by Edsger Dijkstra and Peter Naur, was a big mistake. General recursion leads to unpredictable procedure activation, thus requiring the existence of a run-time stack. However, in the more holistic view of programming as an activity of specifying system behavior, being able to layout procedure activation records statically is important if programs are to be used for designing hardware circuits. In this talk, I present a vision of the future of programming, where we need programming languages to describe both hardware and software, complete with built-in verification tools.

See also: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-into-programming-a-comedy-of-errors-3/

Hans-Dieter A. Hiep is a specialist in formal methods and automated reasoning techniques, with an academic interest in mathematical logic, separation logic, dynamic logic; interactive, automated and distributed theorem proving; and operational, denotational, and axiomatic semantics of programming languages. In 2024, he finished a Ph.D. program in Computer Science at Leiden University, Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). In 2018, he finished a M.Sc. program in Computer Science joint-degree at the Vrije Universiteit and Universiteit van Amsterdam (VU/UvA), specializing in foundations of computing and concurrency.