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I sympathize with the grandparaent comment. The first three aren't exactly unique. Many languages are parallel and portable and productive. Listing adjectives

by tyre 7y ago

I sympathize with the grandparaent comment. The first three aren't exactly unique. Many languages are parallel and portable and productive. Listing adjectives isn't a "why". A "why" would be: "Chapel is a language built for distributed memory systems. Unlike X or Y, Chapel has first class language concepts for distributed memory management, sharded storage…" etc. etc. (I just made that up.) Then you know right off the bat whether this language is the one you need for the problem you have. What you refer to as a silly meme might also be a legitimate critique that surfaces again and again when hackers/engineers build things that solve a problem they have, think it is cool or interesting, but aren't able to communicate the value to others. It's not unreasonable to ask, at the very least, for a simple "why does this exist?" (An entirely reasonable answer to which might be, "because I thought it was cool!")

throwqwerty 7y ago
>It's not unreasonable to ask, at the very least, for a simple "why does this exist?" really? you don't think it's unreasonable to ask to be spoon fed on top of a team having gone through the effort of writing and supporting the language itself? i do think it is unreasonable.
- eyegor 7y ago
  Surely anyone who works on this project could tell me why it exists, why it's better than rolling slurm/bash scripts. That feels like a bare minimum sales pitch. Instead the homepage is essentially buzzwords with links to watch the talk or read the docs. I'm sure anyone who uses this could say, "well, it makes x task much easier/more concise! This is much more difficult to accomplish using y" or something similar.
- dgb23 7y ago
  It would be such a low hanging fruit to put a concise rationale there. That’s not spoon feeding, but giving a minimal amount of opinionated context so a visitor isn’t completely lost when unfamiliar with the technology.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> A "why" would be: «Chapel has the goal of supporting any parallel algorithm you can conceive of on any parallel hardware you want to target. In particular, you should never hit a point where you think “Well, that was fun while it lasted, but now that I want to do x, I’d better go back to MPI.» https://www.cray.com/blog/chapel-productive-parallel-programming/ https://www.cray.com/blog/chapel-productive-parallel-program...

by tyre 7y ago

throwqwerty 7y ago

>It's not unreasonable to ask, at the very least, for a simple "why does this exist?" really? you don't think it's unreasonable to ask to be spoon fed on top of a team having gone through the effort of writing and supporting the language itself? i do think it is unreasonable.

eyegor 7y ago
Surely anyone who works on this project could tell me why it exists, why it's better than rolling slurm/bash scripts. That feels like a bare minimum sales pitch. Instead the homepage is essentially buzzwords with links to watch the talk or read the docs. I'm sure anyone who uses this could say, "well, it makes x task much easier/more concise! This is much more difficult to accomplish using y" or something similar.
dgb23 7y ago
It would be such a low hanging fruit to put a concise rationale there. That’s not spoon feeding, but giving a minimal amount of opinionated context so a visitor isn’t completely lost when unfamiliar with the technology.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> A "why" would be: «Chapel has the goal of supporting any parallel algorithm you can conceive of on any parallel hardware you want to target. In particular, you should never hit a point where you think “Well, that was fun while it lasted, but now that I want to do x, I’d better go back to MPI.» https://www.cray.com/blog/chapel-productive-parallel-programming/ https://www.cray.com/blog/chapel-productive-parallel-program...