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

Strange Loop Conference · 9.3K views · 2021-06-21 · 1:09:38

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Overview

Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer. He also recounts fitting a program onto a single punch card.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a fantastic talk, valued both for its parallelism ideas and for the punch-card story.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2022–2024

Topics

Programming language designFunctional programmingHistory of computing
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guy steeleparallelismlanguage designpunch cards

What people said

svieira · 2023-11 · Strong recommendation

By thinking about things that were not applicable to the problem domain says Guy Steele in "How to Think about Parallel Programing: Not!": [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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MathMonkeyMan · 2023-07 · Recommendation

Guy Steele Jr. worked on a language called "Fortress." There are a few good talks that he gives: - (toy problem) [LINK] - (parallelism) [VIDEO] - (languages) [LINK]

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sitkack · 2024-07 · Reference

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) [VIDEO] transcript [LINK] thanks matthiasn! Previous discussion [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Strange Loop Conference, played through YouTube.

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