Strong and eventual consistency. Two terms you’re going to hear more of in the future, so be prepared.
I personally prefer read/write. Strong and eventual describe the state of the data, read/write describe operations against the data. And in the World Wild Web view of things, read consistency is actionable. Either way, we asked for it, so I for one welcome our new lesser consistency overlords.
Too many choices. Timothy Mattson nails it:
And then we show them the parallel programming environments they can work with: MPI, OpenMP, Ct, HPF, TBB, Erlang, Shmemm, Portals, ZPL, BSP, CHARM++, Cilk, Co-array Fortran, PVM, Pthreads, windows threads, Tstreams, GA, Java, UPC, Titanium, Parlog, NESL,Split-C … and the list goes on and on. If we aren’t careful, the result could very well be a “choice overload” experience with softwre vendors running away in frustration.
Essentially we’re about to replace the problem of multi-cores with the problem of multi-models. And occasionally, good models paired with bad languages, or the other way around. And a lot of non-transferable skills and bike sheds to follow.
Sigh.
And only because … Money quote from Reddit, in response to Aristotle’s post:
Lock allocation and deallocation are the new malloc()/free(), though. Everybody wants to feel like they’re better than average at it.
Apropos. Damn hard, living in the past:
Engineers working on version 2.0 wave away bug reports on the current version. “It’ll be fixed in the rewrite.” Don’t bother me with that. It’s already in the past, even if it’s a current trouble for someone else.
Or for that matter, going back:
…once I manage to actually get something to compile and it seems to be running right, I am certainly desperate to reuse it rather than go through rebuilding it again.
Something right. While the new Zune is as exciting as last year’s Dell (and nearly as expensive), I do have to give it to Microsoft. They did one thing right:
The first generation 30GB Zune—which 1.2 million of you already purchased—is getting all the new Zune’s features. All. Sure, the new Zune is more of a half step forward than a completely new design. But Microsoft’s done something fantastic here by rewarding first gen buyers with cool new stuff that also happens to be free by software upgrade.
Picture above, what the next generation looks like.
Crosbie Fitch
Assaf