[Haskell-cafe] I read somewhere that for 90% of a wide class of computing problems, you only need 10% of the source code in Haskell, that you would in an imperative language.

[Andrew Coppin]

Tom Tobin wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 3:26 AM, Andrew Coppin
> <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
>   
>> It might be a better argument to say that human thinking is fundamentally
>> sequential; parallel computers have been around for a little while now...
>>     
>
> Perhaps *conscious* human thinking is sequential — yet our brains are
> massively parallel processors, and have been around for quite a long
> time.  ;-)
>   

This is very true. And it's just as well; I read somewhere that the 
maximum firing rate of a neuron gives the human brain an effective 
"clock frequency" of about 100 MHz - which isn't terribly fast. But it's 
massively parallel, as you say.

Actually, I just had a flash of inspiration: Maybe the reason 
programmers tend to think sequentially is because programmers tend to be 
*men*. Maybe the way to hardness the multicores is to get more women 
into programming? :-D