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"How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!" - Guy L. Steele Jr. (Strange Loop 2010)

Strange Loop Conference

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Guy L. Steele Jr., Sun Fellow
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

9.2K views5 years ago2 recommendations

Programming languagesSystems programmingLanguage design and type systemsConcurrency and parallelismFunctional programming

Guy L. Steele Jr. argues that programming languages, not programmers, should manage parallelism through divide-and-conquer algorithms and mathematical properties like commutativity.

Guy L. Steele Jr. believes that it should not be the programmer’s job to think about parallelism, but languages should provide ways to transparently run tasks in parallel. This requires a new approach in building languages supporting algorithms built on independence and build-and-conquer principles rather than on linear decomposition of problems. Speaker: Guy L. Steele Jr. Guy Steele is a Sun Fellow for Sun Microsystems Laboratories, working on the Programming Language Research project. He received his A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College (1975), and his S.M. and Ph.D. in computer science and artificial intelligence from MIT (1977 and 1980). Prior to joining Sun Microsystems, he was an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its insights into language design for parallelism and an entertaining opening story about fitting a program onto a single punch card.

Moments people linked to

svieiraon Hacker News • Recommends

On “In the bad old days we had Punchcards. How did people deal with that?”

By thinking about things that were not applicable to the problem domain says Guy Steele in "How to Think about Parallel Programing: Not!": link to this video It's a fantastic talk in its own right, but the first bit about fitting a program onto a punch card by self-modifying the code involved (and just how much thought was about fitting-the-program, and how little relatively is involved in the-purpose-of-the-program) is quite eye opening.
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MathMonkeyManon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Coroutines for Go”

Guy Steele Jr. worked on a language called "Fortress." There are a few good talks that he gives: - (toy problem) link - (parallelism) link to this video - (languages) link
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EdwardCoffinon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What story from the PDP-8 era would make a good script?”

Guy Steele has a talk 1 in which he recounts making some sort of utility program for the contemporary of the PDP-8, the IBM 1130. He describes all the gymnastics he went through to try to pack it into a single punch card, and also describes the benefits of having such a program on a single punch card rather than a series of them. 1 "How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!" - Guy L. Steele Jr. (Strange Loop 2010) link to this video
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yakubinon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Algebra”

Commutativity is important for e.g. parallel programming. See e.g. < link to this video >. In the context of linear algebra, it would also be good for folks to know that matrix multiplication (/linear transformation composition) is not commutative.
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sitkackon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Synchronization Is Bad for Scale”

I would use Aerospike, it has strong consistency or session consistency and will soon get multirecord transactions. link And also see the second bullet point from this Guy Steele talk from 2010 Strange Loop. Synchronization and ordering and a lack of idempotency need to be heavily justified. "How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!" - Guy L. Steele Jr. (Strange Loop 2010) link to this video transcript link thanks matthiasn! Previous discussion link
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adrianton3on Computer Science Stack Exchange • Mentions

On “Recursive decomposition if a sequence can be parsed in both directions”

http://research.nii.ac.jp/~hu/pub/popl09.pdf I watched a talk by Guy Steele years ago which was nowhere to be found so I thought it's my imagination. Said talk was reuploaded and he mentions this implication and paper at link to this video this timestamp
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