Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem

Re:Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem by willvarfar on Thursday March 28, 2013 @09:13AM (#5454556)

I think the post is about parallelism. Its about how Erlang naturally scales to many cores by running in parallel. If Erlang had only concurrency, as Javascript does, it would not be solving the "right problem".

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Re:Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem by seanmcdirmid on Thursday March 28, 2013 @10:17AM (#5454861)

Again, even if Erlang supports hardware threading properly, it doesn't magically become a good platform for parallel computing, there is no guarantee it will scale at all.

Its funny actually: a PL person thinks the key to scalable parallelism is hardware threading; a graphics or systems person thinks the key is a well planned pipeline.

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Re:Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem by willvarfar on Thursday March 28, 2013 @07:35PM (#5458342)

http://talks.golang.org/2012/waza.slide

"Once we have the breakdown, parallelization can fall out and correctness is easy."

Joe is saying this too. And he's saying that because Erlang is a concurrent language, parallelism (he's thinking MIMD not SIMD) is easy. He says:

> Now Erlang is (in case you missed it) a concurrent language, so Erlang programs should in principle go a lot faster when run on parallel computers, the only thing that stops this is if the Erlang programs have sequential bottlenecks.

I don't think he - nor the Go chaps - conflate concurrency and parallelism.

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Re:Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem by seanmcdirmid on Thursday March 28, 2013 @07:54PM (#5458418)

My main issue here is that people here "parallelism" and "a lot faster" they automatically think "scaling." But just hardware threading doesn't get us anywhere near that goal, even if we write our C-style multi-threaded code by hand very carefully.

The PL community is still not having honest up-to-date conversations about parallelism; they are about 20 years behind other fields.

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Re:Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem by willvarfar on Thursday March 28, 2013 @08:54PM (#5458644)

Ok, you have to describe what you think the honest and up-to-date conversation about parallelism is then.

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Re:Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem by seanmcdirmid on Thursday March 28, 2013 @09:35PM (#5458774)

Well, look at how people like Google's Jeff Dean, originally a PL person, became a systems person to basically attack parallelism problems head on. That is, look at the problems that NEED parallel computing, don't think of parallelism as a transparent benefit that is nice to have if it happens, and if it doesn't, its not the end of the world.

Once you accept that parallelism is needed, you realize that it is much more complex than just dividing things up onto multiple cores. That locking is never really the big problem, which really is one of concurrency, the problem becomes all about pumping data to the right place at the right time.

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