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Author: andrey mirtchovskiandrey mirtchovski Date: Jul 28, 2008 10:14
found this snippet today and decided to share it with the list. every
once in a while a look at how "the rest of the world" does things is
beneficial :)
"I don't know about you, but every time I have to program with threads
and shared resources, I want to remove my face incrementally with a
salad fork. Locks, mutexes, the synchronized keyword; all of these
things can strike fear into the heart of a green developer. Most
seasoned developers just fall into a rut of depression when it's time
for multi-threading. Developers like me simply talk our way out of it.
It's easier than thinking."
full article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/28/sun_dziuba_tm/
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Author: tlarondetlaronde Date: Jul 28, 2008 10:54
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:11:19AM -0600, andrey mirtchovski wrote:
> found this snippet today and decided to share it with the list. every
> once in a while a look at how "the rest of the world" does things is
> beneficial :)
>
> "I don't know about you, but every time I have to program with threads
> and shared resources, I want to remove my face incrementally with a
> salad fork. Locks, mutexes, the synchronized keyword; all of these
> things can strike fear into the heart of a green developer. Most
> seasoned developers just fall into a rut of depression when it's time
> for multi-threading. Developers like me simply talk our way out of it.
> It's easier than thinking."
On the same subject, this quote from Donald E. Knuth, Volume 4
fascicle 0 (new addition to The Art of Computer Programming, published
in may 2008)---Preface:
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Author: Pietro GagliardiPietro Gagliardi Date: Jul 28, 2008 12:56
On Jul 28, 2008, at 1:11 PM, andrey mirtchovski wrote:
> salad fork. Locks, mutexes, the synchronized keyword; all of these
> things can strike fear into the heart of a green developer. Most
That's what you get for using Java.
On Jul 28, 2008, at 1:50 PM, tlaronde@ polynum.com wrote: > I'm unable to judge what ideas about
> parallelism are likely to be useful five or ten years from now, let
> alone fifty,
By that time, $50 (not $500 or $5,000, but $50) computers will be
around that will have processors with as many cores as Blue Gene, thus
almost completely eliminating the problems of multithreaded
programming. Data synchronization will be solved by simply turning off
one of the processors until the critical code has completed.
If only I could tell him that without having to wait for the snail!
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Author: Russ CoxRuss Cox Date: Jul 28, 2008 14:09
Don Knuth:
> I'm unable to judge what ideas about parallelism are likely to
> be useful five or ten years from now, let alone fifty, so I happily
> leave such questions to others who are wiser than I.
Pietro:
> By that time, ...
> If only I could tell him that without having to wait for the snail!
I can't think of anything nice to say.
Russ
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Author: Skip TavakkolianSkip Tavakkolian Date: Jul 28, 2008 14:35
> Don Knuth:
>> I'm unable to judge what ideas about parallelism are likely to
>> be useful five or ten years from now, let alone fifty, so I happily
>> leave such questions to others who are wiser than I.
>
> Pietro:
>> By that time, ...
>> If only I could tell him that without having to wait for the snail!
>
> I can't think of anything nice to say.
>
> Russ
Pietro has a great future in talk radio.
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Author: Roman V. ShaposhnikRoman V. Shaposhnik Date: Jul 29, 2008 11:40
> On the same subject, this quote from Donald E. Knuth, Volume 4
> fascicle 0 (new addition to The Art of Computer Programming, published
> in may 2008)---Preface:
>
> "Furthermore, as in earlier volumes of this serie, I'm
> intentionnally concentrating almost entirely on _sequential_
> algorithms, even though computers are increasingly able to carry out
> activities in parallel. I'm unable to judge what ideas about
> parallelism are likely to be useful five or ten years from now, let
> alone fifty, so I happily leave such questions to others who are
> wiser than I. Sequential methods, by themselves, already test the
> limits of my own ability to discern what the artful programmers of
> tomorrow will want to know."
>
I believe this is the biggest point in all of the hype around
concurrency as the
next programming paradigm: it is very hard to approach the algorithmic
side of it. And no, I'm not talking locking-hygiene, I'm talking design and
implementation of basic (and no so basic ) algorithms. ...
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Date: Jul 29, 2008 12:16
On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:40:39 PDT "Roman V. Shaposhnik" sun.com> wrote:>> On the same subject, this quote from Donald E. Knuth, Volume 4
>> fascicle 0 (new addition to The Art of Computer Programming, published
>> in may 2008)---Preface:
>>
>> "Furthermore, as in earlier volumes of this serie, I'm
>> intentionnally concentrating almost entirely on _sequential_
>> algorithms, even though computers are increasingly able to carry out
>> activities in parallel. I'm unable to judge what ideas about
>> parallelism are likely to be useful five or ten years from now, let
>> alone fifty, so I happily leave such questions to others who are
>> wiser than I. Sequential methods, by themselves, already test the
>> limits of my own ability to discern what the artful programmers of
>> tomorrow will want to know."
>>
> I believe this is the biggest point in all of the hype around
> concurrency as the
> next programming paradigm: it is very hard to approach the algorithmic
> side of it. And no, I'm not talking locking-hygiene, I'm talking design and ...
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Author: tlarondetlaronde Date: Jul 30, 2008 04:39
On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 12:12:05PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
>
> It is slightly depressing to think that the situation has not really
> changed since EWD wrote this in 1975. It will take some young
> whippersnapper of a Dijkstra or Hoare or Strachey or Iverson or Backus
> to find the critical insight that will make reasoning about parallel
> algorithm no more difficult than sequential ones.
Is the human thought process parallel? For _my capacities_, I have the
impression that I'm more multitask than parallel. And context switch is
expensive because there is not only explicit data, but also implicit and
I'm not able, if I'm really doing something involved, to restore the
previous state without much ado.
CSP is (for me) the best answer to problem involving blocking/waiting on
input. But this is not parallelism.
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Author: Roman V. ShaposhnikRoman V. Shaposhnik Date: Jul 30, 2008 04:55
On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 13:35 +0200, tlaronde@ polynum.com wrote: > On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 12:12:05PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
>>
>> It is slightly depressing to think that the situation has not really
>> changed since EWD wrote this in 1975. It will take some young
>> whippersnapper of a Dijkstra or Hoare or Strachey or Iverson or Backus
>> to find the critical insight that will make reasoning about parallel
>> algorithm no more difficult than sequential ones.
>
> Is the human thought process parallel?
No. But to give you an example of why that shouldn't matter I would
like to note that the human thought is, in my opinion, finite. Yet,
we have developed very nice and efficient tools for comprehending and
reasoning about infinity.
> The most efficient is to have tools that match the way our brains work
> (or not...). I'm not convinced our brains are "parallel" (at least mines
> are not).
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Author: Robert RaschkeRobert Raschke Date: Jul 30, 2008 05:01
I think useful parallel programming paradigms can very probably be
abstracted from really big systems like a national health system or an
army. How parallelism is employed in those systems, would be a good
starting point for a deeper investigation.
Especially a military system must have some very concrete, well tried
and tested, ways of organising things in parallel. Government is
another one, but I'm not sure if that's a good model ;-)
Robby
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