Parallel programming paper

[Edward Diener]

Bruce Adams wrote:
> On Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:47:19 +0100, Edward Diener 
> <eddielee_no_spam_here at tropicsoft.com> wrote:
> 
>> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>> Has anyone heard of this?:
>>>  Erasmus: A Modular Language for Concurrent Programming
>>> http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~grogono/Erasmus/E01.pdf
>>>  I haven't really read it all the way through but it was mentioned on 
>>> another list I'm on.  Sounds a lot like Erlang to me at first glance. 
>>> But I don't really know Erlang. :-)
>>>  May be interesting food for thought.
>>
>> Why people write articles without defining basic terminology, as if 
>> like Humpty Dumpty in "Alice in Wonderland" words should mean whatever 
>> they determine them to mean, is a mystery to me.
>>
>> Reading a number of pages in the article, relating to OOP versus 
>> "processes", no definition of the latter term was even given ! Because 
>> of that I gave it a D- and quit.
>>
>> What is really needed is a university whose sole purpose is to teach 
>> computer programmers how to write discursive essays. Those who appear 
>> to be the most talented often have no clue.
> 
> To be fair, whatever you are writing you have to make certain 
> assumptions about your
> readers background knowledge. You can't introduce every term every time.
> For academic papers the target audience is most certainly not the D 
> newsgroup.
> The range of abilities and backgrounds here is too vast to cover without 
> several
> weighty tomes many of which would be boring to some. GIYF (Google is 
> your friend).

If the word "process" meant exactly one thing in computer programming, 
then I would agree with you. But the word "process" means something to 
me that evidently has no relation to whatever way the author of the 
article is using it, and I believe my understanding of it, after 30 
years of programming, is that of the vast majority ( a process is a 
separate executable running within an operating system's address space ).

Perhaps the author of the article should use a much more specific term, 
in general use, to describe whatever type of programming he means by 
"process", or at least provide an early reference to wherever the term 
is commonly defined.

If you are arguing about the merits of OOP versus "process" programming, 
it behooves you to explain very explicitly what you mean by the latter 
term since the former has more than two decades of understanding behind 
it and the latter is some concept you are trying to introduce and promote.