alt Hacker NewsAh yes, pretending we can access infinite amounts of memory instantaneously or in a finite/bounded amount of time is the achilles heel of the Von Neumann abstract computer model, and is the point where it completely diverges from physical reality.
Acknowledging that memory access is not instantaneous immediately throws you into the realm of distributed systems though and something much closer to an actor model of computation. It's a pretty meaningful theoretical gap, more so than people realize.
I would like to see someone pick up Knuth’s torch and formulate a new order of complexity for distributed computing.
Many of the products we use, and for probably the last fifty years really, live in the space between theory and practice. We need to collect all of this and teach it. Computer has grown 6, maybe more orders of magnitude since Knuth pioneered these techniques. In any other domain of computer science the solutions often change when the order of magnitude of the problem changes, and after several it’s inescapable.