I've not read the thread, but still feel obliged to dive in with two
counter-arguments to Sapir-Whorf. (01)
one is people do work-arounds, you don't have the word, you come up
with something close (02)
two is, if you see a tree, it's still a tree (03)
Cheers,
Danny. (04)
On 25 February 2013 02:01, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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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