content: The more abstraction layers you add the worse it gets. This is why I love chips that can execute Java bytecode or Forth directly. Either that or analog electronics and a soldering iron.  Oh, did I mention that I hate Von Neumann's guts? He knew precisely the limitations if a Von Neumann machine as a computing environment. He knew that  a machine that stores data and instructions in the same memory space could never be secured. And the original Idea wasn't his either. He simply stole the idea fom  John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, the guys who developed ENIAC. What we know as Von Neumann architecture should have been known as Eckert-Maulchy architecture and it should have never made it past the 70's.