David Barbour wrote:
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 8:25 AM, Eugen Leitl <[email protected] <mailto:[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.
And for that matter, driving a car, playing a sport, walking and chewing gum at the same time :-)
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. ;)
Come to think of it, tracing flow-of-control through an object-oriented system REALLY is a universe of pain (consider the difference between a simulation - say a massively multiplayer game - where each entity is modeled as an object, with one or two threads winding their way through every object, 20 times a second; vs. modeling each entity as a process/actor).
Cheers, Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
