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

By thinking about things that were not applicable to the problem domain says Guy Steele in "How to Think about Parallel Programing: Not!": ▶ 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.

in “In the bad old days we had Punchcards. How did people deal with that?” · View on HN

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

in “Coroutines for Go” · View on HN

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) ▶ this video transcript [link] thanks matthiasn! Previous discussion [link]

in “Synchronization Is Bad for Scale” · View on HN

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

in “Algebra” · View on HN

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) ▶ this video

in “Ask HN: What story from the PDP-8 era would make a good script?” · View on HN