On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 8:25 AM, Eugen Leitl <[email protected]> wrote: > It's not just imperative programming. The superficial mode of human > cognition is sequential. This is the problem with all of mathematics > and computer science as well. >
Perhaps human attention is basically sequential, as we're only able to focus our eyes on one point and use two hands. But I think humans understand parallel behavior well enough - maintaining multiple relationships, for example, and predicting the behaviors of multiple people. > > If you look at MPI debuggers, it puts people into a whole other > universe of pain that just multithreading. > I can think of a lot of single-threaded interfaces that put people in a universe of pain. It isn't clear to me that distribution is at fault there. ;) In any case, message passing and event models are still clinging tightly to their imperative heritage. > > > Dataflows and pipelines can be parallelized without issue and remain > > deterministic. If we push more of the parallelism to the code, the > hardware > > can also be less complex - i.e. less architecture to hide latency for > > memory access. > > Global memory doesn't scale in a relativistic universe. Ditto cache > coherence for already reasonable small number of caches. > > So, we don't really have a choice other to stop worrying, and learn > to love parallelism. > True, but we can also make it a lot less complex. Regards, Dave -- bringing s-words to a pen fight
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