[Haskell-cafe] Haskell-Cafe Digest, Vol 158, Issue 29

[Joachim Durchholz]

Am 02.11.2016 um 01:24 schrieb Richard A. O'Keefe:
>
>> The hope with FPLs was that you do not need to explicitly specify it
>> anymore, because the compiler can manage that.
>
> The Alan Perlis quote applies:
>    When someone says: "I want a programming language in which
>    I need only say what I wish done", give him a lollipop.

It does not really apply, the quote talks about how "say what one wishes 
one" turns into a programming language, albeit a higher-level one.
We're talking about assigning memory to memory areas. That's a very 
different story, and one where other previously unthinkable features are 
applied by GHC today, such as efficient automatic memory reclamation, or 
elimination of intermediate data structures.

>>> If the data need to be available
>>> in some other process, there is some sort of fairly explicit
>>> communication.
>>
>> Which means that you do not have a simple function call anymore, but an
>> extra API layer.
>
> Here you have left me behind. WHAT was "a simple function call"?
> WHAT is "an extra API layer", as opposed to annotations like the
> distribution annotations in ZPL and HPFortran?

I wasn't aware of these annotations, so I was talking from the 
perspective how you'd do it in one of today's vanilla languages.

>>  Plus, the more I read about various
>> forms of partitioning computations (not just NUMA but also IPC and
>> networking), the more it seems that hardware moves towards making the
>> barriers higher, not lower (the reason being that this helps making
>> computations within the barrier more efficient).
>>
>> If that's a general trend, that's bad news for network, IPC, or NUMA
>> transparency. Which is going to make programming for these harder, not
>> easier :-(
>
> On the one hand, agreed.  On the other hand, while programming in the
> 1960s still *is* getting harder, it's not clear that we cannot find an
> approach that will be easier.

Agreed.