IMHO that's like saying higher level programming languages than assembly are unnecessary. Or that a debugger is useless.
And not just the learning purposes. Imagine the possibilities if we could properly simulate (and speed up the simulation) the world - what if we could use genetic algorithms to develop an organism.
> IMHO that's like saying higher level programming languages than assembly are unnecessary. Or that a debugger is useless.
These two statements are quite different. Higher level programming languages than assembly are unnecessary; anything beyond the lambda calculus is unnecessary (assuming our goal is to compute Turing computable things). That's very different from saying that they're useless; just because they can be done without doesn't mean that they should.
I know that these statements are quite different, I deliberately made two different examples - one about creating and one about debugging. A world simulator is going to be a test environment for us as well as an introspection tool.
And not just the learning purposes. Imagine the possibilities if we could properly simulate (and speed up the simulation) the world - what if we could use genetic algorithms to develop an organism.