As Doug Fisher said at JavaOne, "hardware without software just generates heat"
The same has been said for functional languages without side effects: "A purely functional programming language is only good for heating your computer." -- Rich Hickey :)
In the book Permutation City, people are just able to upload a copy of their brains into a computer. But the simulations are so big that they run slowly. So a billionaire not only uploads a copy of his consciousness, he also runs a massive optimization routine on it! After a few years of chugging along, the optimizer spits out an empty file and reports: "This program has no output."
The same has been said for functional languages without side effects: "A purely functional programming language is only good for heating your computer." -- Rich Hickey :)