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Choice Overload In Parallel Programming

scott3778 writes to recommend a post by Timothy Mattson over at Intel's Research Blog. He argues, convincingly, that the most important paper for programming language designers to read today is one written by two social psychology professors in 2000. This is the well-known academic study, "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire too Much of a Good Thing?" "And then we show them the parallel programming environments they can work with: MPI, OpenMP, Ct, HPF, TBB, Erlang, Shmemm, Portals, ZPL, BSP, CHARM++, Cilk, Co-array Fortran, PVM, Pthreads, windows threads, Tstreams, GA, Java, UPC, Titanium, Parlog, NESL,Split-C... and the list goes on and on. If we aren't careful, the result could very well be a 'choice overload' experience with software vendors running away in frustration."

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  1. Re:Fortran by noidentity · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    "Dear god, the mind damage from Fortran don't just effect your logic skills, they effect your language centers as well! You can't even remember the difference between "fond" and "hell on earth"."

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

    effect vs. affect