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

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

Strange Loop Conference
2 HN recommenders · discussed 2022–2024
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About this video

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.

Why it appears in the archive

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

AI-generated summary and labels from the source dataset; verify important details against the video. Source & credits.

From the Hacker News discussion

svieira · 2023-11 · strong rec

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 · rec

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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EdwardCoffin · 2022-11 · reference

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) [VIDEO]

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yakubin · 2023-10 · reference

Commutativity is important for e.g. parallel programming. See e.g. < [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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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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