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New Languages Vs. Old For Parallel Programming
joabj writes "Getting the most from multicore processors is becoming an increasingly difficult task for programmers. DARPA has commissioned a number of new programming languages, notably X10 and Chapel, written especially for developing programs that can be run across multiple processors, though others see them as too much of a departure to ever gain widespread usage among coders."
Huh? What spoken language is Perl supposed to be?
Read the Wikipedia. Not PERL itself, but, from the article:
Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention afterwards of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible.
Great, just what we need. More clueless crusaders giving otherwise peaceful peoples the tools to become planet cancer. But there's more:
Wall's Christian faith has influenced...Perl, such as the name itself, a biblical reference to the "Pearl of great price" (Matthew 13:46). Similar references are the function name bless, and...Perl 6 design documents with categories such as apocalypse and exegesis. Wall has also alluded to his faith when he has spoken at conferences, including a rather straightforward statement of his beliefs...
I would never work for anybody who used PERL.
Of the billions of lines of code that runs on most of the world's fastest supercomputers, 99% of it is in FORTRAN. This will NEVER CHANGE. PERIOD. Anybody who tries to change this, should be shown the door. Granted, most if it is still Fortran77, but it works, runs the fastests and the easist to maintain. This is why the next generation of Fortran (Fortran 2008) will be hard-core, parallel driven. You "C" beanies will need C/OPENMPI/OPENMP/TAU to just even try to match Fortran2008's power. Intel knows this, this is why all their parallel libraries, codes and tools are geared for Fortran and NOT C. Live with it...