On Thursday, 8 September 2016 at 10:18:36 UTC, Russel Winder
wrote:
I am certainly hoping that Chapel will be the language to
displace NumPy for serious computation in the Python-sphere.
Given it's foundation in the PGAS model, it has all the
parallelism needs, both cluster and local, built in. Given
Chapel there is no need to look at C++, D, Rust, Cython, etc.
I can see where you are coming from, I have taken a look at
Chapel and high performance computing is their top priority. I
think they hope that it will be the next Fortran, but I think it
is very much a domain specific language. They have clearly given
plenty of thought to distributed computing, parallelization and
concurrency that could yield some very nice performance
advantages. However Python's advantage is that it is a dynamic
language and can act as a front end to algorithms written in
C/C++ for instance as Google has done with TensorFlow. In the
future it could even act as a front end to Chapel since they now
have a C API.
However, I feel as if computer programming languages are still in
this static-dynamic partnership, e.g. Python with C/C++, R and
Fortran/C/C++. It means language overhead always maintaining code
in more than one language and always having to amend your
interface every time you change something in one or the other. In
essence, nothing fundamentally different is happening with
current new languages. I hate to sound like a broken record, but
what Sparrow proposes is a unification in such a way that all
kinds of overheads go away. Making something like that work with
the principles of Sparrow would be a revolution in computing.
