Re: Determinism is hard & not the only thing on our plate...
On Aug 4 2011, Dan Zuras Intervals wrote:
Nick, I don't want to go tit for tat with you in an open
forum in the hope that one of us will change our mind.
That does nobody any good & pisses off our readers.
Determinism is hard. You have to pay a price for it.
Things can be done to mediate the problem of parallelism
but it is true that performance is part of the cost.
This does not mean we should not offer our users the means
to compute deterministically. We should. We should also
offer them other things.
It is clear that we are still not communicating. I am asserting not
just that it is hard and conflicts with performance, but that it is
actually infeasible. Some of the infeasibilities that I am claiming
are mathematical or are statements about what language standards say,
and therefore subject to proof or disproof. In those cases, there
are two possibilities:
I am wrong, and therefore my statements can be disproved. In this
case, I should be corrected, and then I should just shut up.
I am right, and therefore you are proposing an infeasible project.
In this case, following the path you propose will lead to 1788 failing,
whether or not it is completed.
Regards,
Nick Maclaren.