The movie "Until the End of the World" has an entertaining scene where a Russian search agent took on the shape of a Bear that was prowling around 3D representation of different buildings, which in turn represented different agencies and thus different databases, while muttering in a bearish voice: "Searching... stiiiillllleee searching". This was in 1991. It was hilarious! There were other avatars, as well, and they all had different personalities that matched the person using them. This is not, some irritating marketing guy deciding what persona that you would like, along with the rest of the world. Think Tamaguci with a difference; collaborative filtering on a personal scale.
For instance, my avatar would be a cockroach that I could squash with a satisfying crunch - before it would wait and skitter away. Even better if I could fry it with my iPhone G4's sonic iLighter. But, that's merely my own preference. Your preferred skin may be a bash window, Paris Hilton in prison stripes, or both.
The traditional multi-threading technique is where you set a programmer at his computer and tell him parallelize stuff. The functional programmer will certainly identify parts of the code that can be executed in parallel, but I am not sure that is better than any other thread markup.
Perhaps multi-core is an intermediate step towards fine grained parallelism. Self-assembling carbon nanotubes sprayed on with ink-jets may suggest novel approaches to problem solving.
For instance, take the sorting problem, mentioned earlier in this thread. Instead of a sequence of unsorted numbers, you beam them onto a substrate all at once. Lets say that the substrate contains nodes that are arranged where any two vertically arrange nodes are min-max sorted to two horizontally arranged nodes like so:
Now, with some additional magic of redundancy and spin, a vertically arranged unsorted list could by sorted into a horizontally arranged list in O(N) time (albeit in a N^2 space). There is no separation of CPU and memory. Instead, you have a Cellular Automaton that is arranged along an octahedral lattice.
So, which language would best describe such a sort? I don't know. It seems that each language is an attempt to express a range of applications within a domain of op codes in the most compact way possible. Perhaps FP will better fit large-grained parallelism. But, I'm not sure what would best express the mindset of FPGA's, cellular automata, and the neural model of McCulloch and Pitts.
There is an interesting interview between Alan Cooper and Kent Beck at http://www.fawcette.com/interviews/beck_cooper/def ault.asp
Cooper was testing his ideas on goal centered design through his "Design+Fun" workshops. I offered up the opinion to Alan that software design is a bi-directional search: with firmware on one end and wetware on the other end. Alan and Kent start from either side of this search.
From XP, I gather that there is much exploration of the domain of APIs to deploy a solution. Writing code immediately helps document the search in such a domain.
From Goal centered design, there is much exploration of the range of a customer's goals. Writing designs helps document the search in such a range.
Using both: Goals help prune unnecessary features, while XP helps prune unrealistic expectations. While using either method could get the job done, perhaps using both is more efficient.
Yes, I like to pair program. My partner is a computer. I benefit from the expertise and experience of dozens of other developers who wrote the syntax checker.
Some people write code like a Jazz improvisation --bouncing ideas back and forth. Others write code like a classic composer -- conceiving a grand vision for the conductor and performers. Which method is best depends on whether you plan on kickin your heels or simply kickin back.
> What do the programmers in India think of XP and pair programming?
They were doing probably it first.
I was developing software with an Indian company based in Madras, in 1980's. Because there were more programmers than computers, they had two coders to a box. I was amazed to see one type in a line and the other hit return key.
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The movie "Until the End of the World" has an entertaining scene where a Russian search agent took on the shape of a Bear that was prowling around 3D representation of different buildings, which in turn represented different agencies and thus different databases, while muttering in a bearish voice: "Searching ... stiiiillllleee searching". This was in 1991. It was hilarious! There were other avatars, as well, and they all had different personalities that matched the person using them. This is not, some irritating marketing guy deciding what persona that you would like, along with the rest of the world. Think Tamaguci with a difference; collaborative filtering on a personal scale.
For instance, my avatar would be a cockroach that I could squash with a satisfying crunch - before it would wait and skitter away. Even better if I could fry it with my iPhone G4's sonic iLighter. But, that's merely my own preference. Your preferred skin may be a bash window, Paris Hilton in prison stripes, or both.
To each their own.
The traditional multi-threading technique is where you set a programmer at his computer and tell him parallelize stuff. The functional programmer will certainly identify parts of the code that can be executed in parallel, but I am not sure that is better than any other thread markup.
Perhaps multi-core is an intermediate step towards fine grained parallelism. Self-assembling carbon nanotubes sprayed on with ink-jets may suggest novel approaches to problem solving.
For instance, take the sorting problem, mentioned earlier in this thread. Instead of a sequence of unsorted numbers, you beam them onto a substrate all at once. Lets say that the substrate contains nodes that are arranged where any two vertically arrange nodes are min-max sorted to two horizontally arranged nodes like so:
max....min
Now, with some additional magic of redundancy and spin, a vertically arranged unsorted list could by sorted into a horizontally arranged list in O(N) time (albeit in a N^2 space). There is no separation of CPU and memory. Instead, you have a Cellular Automaton that is arranged along an octahedral lattice.
So, which language would best describe such a sort? I don't know. It seems that each language is an attempt to express a range of applications within a domain of op codes in the most compact way possible. Perhaps FP will better fit large-grained parallelism. But, I'm not sure what would best express the mindset of FPGA's, cellular automata, and the neural model of McCulloch and Pitts.
There is an interesting interview between Alan Cooper and Kent Beck at http://www.fawcette.com/interviews/beck_cooper/def ault.asp
Cooper was testing his ideas on goal centered design through his "Design+Fun" workshops. I offered up the opinion to Alan that software design is a bi-directional search: with firmware on one end and wetware on the other end. Alan and Kent start from either side of this search.
From XP, I gather that there is much exploration of the domain of APIs to deploy a solution. Writing code immediately helps document the search in such a domain.
From Goal centered design, there is much exploration of the range of a customer's goals. Writing designs helps document the search in such a range.
Using both: Goals help prune unnecessary features, while XP helps prune unrealistic expectations. While using either method could get the job done, perhaps using both is more efficient.
Yes, I like to pair program. My partner is a computer. I benefit from the expertise and experience of dozens of other developers who wrote the syntax checker. Some people write code like a Jazz improvisation --bouncing ideas back and forth. Others write code like a classic composer -- conceiving a grand vision for the conductor and performers. Which method is best depends on whether you plan on kickin your heels or simply kickin back.
> What do the programmers in India think of XP and pair programming? They were doing probably it first. I was developing software with an Indian company based in Madras, in 1980's. Because there were more programmers than computers, they had two coders to a box. I was amazed to see one type in a line and the other hit return key.