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Re: [ontolog-forum] Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

To: pcmurray2000@xxxxxxxxx, "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Steven Ericsson-Zenith <steven@xxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2013 15:32:16 -0800
Message-id: <09F81A55-8F18-45F0-88A1-BD81F2C4AE50@xxxxxxx>

Dear Phil,    (01)

It is not a question of limiting thought but more to do with directing the 
engineer toward one solution over another, often complicating their thoughts 
and behaviors with unnecessary concerns, and distracting the engineer from the 
task at hand.     (02)

For example, in the case of parallel programming the engineering preoccupation 
becomes data distribution. Speak to a "parallel programmer" and this is what 
they will tell you about before everything else. Whereas it would be more 
desirable and more productive for all concerned if their preoccupation were, in 
fact, the problem at hand.     (03)

In other words, the preoccupation distracts engineers from their primary task: 
algorithmic design. And in fact parallelism itself contributes nothing at all 
to algorithmic design - both issues, parallel decomposition and data 
distribution, provide only performance semantics (a pragmatic).    (04)

The details are in:    (05)

http://www.amazon.com/Process-Interaction-Models-Steven-Ericsson-Zenith/dp/1463777914    (06)

In this book I tried to address this issue for parallel machines. There were 
not so many of these at the time but now, of course, they are pervasive. 
However, I should say that I am happier with my more recent ("Keen") proposals 
in this area.     (07)

I considered only general purpose programming languages, not languages for 
distinct domains. However, these issues are general and will still exist even 
if one or the other language were generally considered more suitable for a 
given application domain.    (08)

Regards,
Steven    (09)


On Feb 24, 2013, at 7:08 AM, Phil Murray <pcmurray2000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:    (010)

> I doubt that a 
> specific language limits what a good programmer thinks should be 
> possible.     (011)


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