Thoughts on parallel programming?

[Sean Kelly]

Walter Bright Wrote:

> Russel Winder wrote:
> > At the heart of all this is that programmers are taught that algorithm
> > is a sequence of actions to achieve a goal.  Programmers are trained to
> > think sequentially and this affects their coding.  This means that
> > parallelism has to be expressed at a sufficiently high level that
> > programmers can still reason about algorithms as sequential things. 
> 
> I think it's more than being trained to think sequentially. I think it is in the 
> inherent nature of how we think.

Distributed programming is essentially a bunch of little sequential program that interact, which is basically how people cooperate in the real world.  I think that is by far the most intuitive of any concurrent programming model, though it's still a significant conceptual shift from the traditional monolithic imperative program.