Dear Phil and Steven,
My comments are below,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
Steven wrote:
Dear Phil,
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.
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.
I disagree. The methods
for parallelizing computation are diverse, and by “directing the engineer”
into one of those methods is counterproductive. Each engineer has a
conception of how to incorporate parallelism, and data distribution is just one
such way.
In my dissertation, I
showed a method for organizing the computation sequence into chunks so that
each chunk could be performed in any one of N computers, and the calculated
output of that chunk and function becomes another chunk to be input to any one
of those N computers. The system self balances, i.e., each computer in a
string has as its first obligation to pass the current chunk on to the next if
and only if that computer is not busy. That is, each processor keeps the
next processor busy before continuing its own calculation. There was a
paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Electronic Computers (September,
1977 I think, or thereabouts) based on the same dissertation.
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).
The details are in:
http://www.amazon.com/Process-Interaction-Models-Steven-Ericsson-Zenith/dp/1463777914
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.
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.
Again, I disagree.
The issues are certainly widespread, but not truly general. The history
of computer architecture shows so many ways to solve concurrent computation
problems that are not related to the language itself, but to the processor
architecture and interconnection method. Language is secondary in that it
conforms to the computing architecture in which the system must run.
However, any language
that addresses parallelism must also map efficiently onto some
architecture. That is not a simple mapping, since multicomputer
architectures are so diverse. With LANs now common, it has become standard
practice to consider the parallel architecture of the LAN (or WAN) to be the
default architecture, but that is not always the case.
Regards,
Steven
On Feb 24, 2013, at 7:08 AM, Phil Murray
<pcmurray2000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I doubt that a
> specific language limits what a good programmer
thinks should be
> possible.
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