[PLUG] Brain the size of a planet
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
znmeb at cesmail.net
Wed May 4 14:15:28 UTC 2005
Bah! As a recovering FORTRAN programmer, I can only say that what
high-performance computing exactly *doesn't* need is another language!
Programming languages are like human languages -- they change, evolve,
grow or die by being used to communicate, with machines and with other
programmers. Just about every language I've ever worked in, including
Lisp, Forth, C, Fortran, Perl, Java and R, whether originally intended
to be used that way or not, can be or has been extended to facilitate
high-performance floating point computation on SIMD or MIMD machines.
That said, I'm also a big fan of programming language research, because
that's where ideas come from. My own personal favorite right now is R
(http://cran.us.r-project.org) for a variety of reasons. The way R (and
its commercial cousin S-Plus and ancestor S) does object-oriented
programming is unique, but just about everything else there looks a lot
like most of the Algol descendants we use today: C/C++, Pascal, Ada,
Perl ...
Russell Senior wrote:
>Speaking of Lisp (etc), has anyone else taken a look at the new
>Fortress language specification[1]? I *really* like the way this
>Steele guy (heh) thinks.
>
>[1] <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/view/673> and
> <http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/fortress0618.pdf>
>
>
>
>
More information about the PLUG
mailing list