Market success does not necessarily prove conceptual neutrality; it just shows which designs fit best within the existing ecosystem of compilers, toolchains, and developer expectations. That is the lock-in the article describes.
Calling the argument post hoc ergo propter hoc also misses the mark. The author is not saying CPUs look this way because of C in a simple cause-effect sense, but that C-style abstractions and hardware co-evolved in a feedback loop that reinforced each other’s assumptions about efficiency.
And I do not think anyone is advocating "disruption for disruption's sake." The point is that our definition of what counts as a worthwhile improvement is already conditioned by that same co-evolution, which makes truly different paradigms seem uneconomical long before they're fully explored.
We'll have to agree to disagree, then. Technologies such as the GPU provided such massive improvements that you either had to get on-board or be left behind. It was the same with assembly line vehicle production, and then robot vehicle production. Some technological enhancements are so significant that disruption is inevitable, despite current "lock-ins".
And that's fine. We're never going to reach 100% efficiency in anything, ever (or 90% for that matter). We're always going to go with what works now, and what requires the least amount of retooling - UNLESS it's such a radical efficiency change that we simply must go along. THOSE are the innovations people actually care about. The 10-20% efficiency improvements, not so much (and rightly so).
You restate that disruptive innovation happens when gains are large enough to overcome inertia, and that smaller conceptual shifts aren't worth pursuing. Your premise is pragmatic: if it mattered, the market would already have adopted it.
This still sidesteps the article's point that what we measure as "efficiency" is itself historically contingent. GPUs succeeded precisely because they exploited massive parallelism within an already compatible model, not because the ecosystem suddenly became open to new paradigms. Your example actually supports the article's argument about selective reinforcement.
There's nothing to agree to disagree about. You're arguing a point the article does not make.
Calling the argument post hoc ergo propter hoc also misses the mark. The author is not saying CPUs look this way because of C in a simple cause-effect sense, but that C-style abstractions and hardware co-evolved in a feedback loop that reinforced each other’s assumptions about efficiency.
And I do not think anyone is advocating "disruption for disruption's sake." The point is that our definition of what counts as a worthwhile improvement is already conditioned by that same co-evolution, which makes truly different paradigms seem uneconomical long before they're fully explored.