Pitchfork, Monday, 8 June 12026 HE
2026-06-08 | 26F08 | 2026-159 | 2461200
2026-W24-1 | Q2 | Estate
a report on a recent protobuf.js exploit revealed a whole category
of vulnerabilities that arise from running data and metadata rather than just
reading it – this “code as data” is a key hallmark of homoiconic programming
languages – homoiconic programming languages are prevalent on computers using
Von Neumann architectures (where programs and data are stored in the same memory
device)
in contrast, Harvard architectures will not only store programs and data in separate devices (ex. flash and RAM) but will often use separate buses to access each (avoiding a Von Neumann bottleneck) – on the programming side, the main category of non-Von Neumann languages are functional programming languages (going back to John Backus’s 1978 article) – but one of the most famous functional language families, Lisp, is also famously homoiconic
Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style? (PDF) ↗
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