4 ms·

I agree, and I've wanted a grid of 1000+ cores for 25 years now, once I realized that the only bottleneck in computing is the bus between CPU and memory back in

I agree, and I've wanted a grid of 1000+ cores for 25 years now, once I realized that the only bottleneck in computing is the bus between CPU and memory back in the late 90s. The only chip that comes even close to what I want for a reasonable price is Apple's M1 line, but they added GPU and AI cores which defeat the purpose. The churn with GPUs and now AI cores is too much for me. I just can't waste time manually annotating the code I want to run concurrently, on GPU, on AI core, whatever. To me, it looks like everyone is putting 10-100 times more work into their code than what should be needed. I see the same pattern repeated with web development and the explosion of walled garden platforms for mobile and smart devices. So much work for so long for so few results. Just give me a big dumb boring grid of cores and a self-parallelizing language to program them. Stuff like Julia/Clojure/MATLAB/Erlang/Go come close, but each have poison pills that make reaching the mainstream untenable. Someday I want to write a language that does what I need, but that day will likely never come, because every day is Quantum Leap for me, I just go to work to make rent, pushing the rock up that hill like Sisyphus, only to watch it roll down and have to start all over again. Inadequate tooling has come to totally dominate every aspect of my work, but there may never be time to write better stuff.

ftxbro 3y ago
> "Stuff like Julia/Clojure/MATLAB/Erlang/Go come close, but each have poison pills that make reaching the mainstream untenable." they have 'mojo' now but it might be proprietary like matlab or mathematica
- snvzz 3y ago
  Still waiting for them to explain what "poison pills" are there. These projects (edit: save MATLAB) are open source, they have the four freedoms.
  - ftxbro 3y ago
    > "These projects are open source" I don't know about the rest of them but MATLAB isn't.
    - snvzz 3y ago
      Right. I got that one mixed up with scilab, which is.
adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
What is the poison pill with Julia for you?
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Also curious.
  - zackmorris 3y ago
    Loosely, pretty much all languages today have some form of: mutability, async, special annotations needed for code that should run concurrently or on the GPU, manual memory management, friction around binding to other languages, ugly or unnecessary syntax, the list of poison pills is endless. I've barely learned portions of Julia, but it does have mutable variables. Once there's a mutable variable, the rest of the language is basically equivalent to transpiling an imperative language like Javascript. As in, there's little advantage over just using higher-order methods within an imperative language, because unexpected behavior can't be prevented, and code can't be statically analyzed beyond where the monad might change. Clojure uses Lisp's prefix syntax with () with no infix or postfix format available, forcing everyone from a C-style background or even a math background to manually convert their notation to prefix. MATLAB uses 1-indexed arrays, and I don't think that there's a config option to make them 0-indexed. Erlang is too esoteric along a number of design choices to ever be mainstream, although its Actor model is great. Go has trouble with exceptional behavior and doesn't isolate variables between threads, negating most of its usefulness for concurrency. Basically what I'm looking for is more like a spreadsheet in code, with no imperative behavior whatsoever. I believe that ClojureScript comes closest by executing functionally without side effects, then allowing imperative behavior while suspended, to get/send IO and then execute again. This most closely matches the way the real world works. Unfortunately languages like Haskell go to great lengths to hide the suspended side of things, making it somewhat of a write-only language like Perl (unreadable to outsiders) and too opaque for students to learn in a reasonable amount of time. The closest language I've encountered that got it almost right was PHP before version 5, when it passed everything by value via copy-on-write and avoided references. Most of the mental load of imperative programming is in reasoning about mutable state. Once classes passed by references arrived, it just became another variation of Javascript. With more syntax warts and inconsistent naming. But since it's conceptually good and mainly ugly in practice, it's still probably my favorite language so far. React and Redux go to great lengths to encapsulate mutable state, but end up with such ugly syntax or syntactic sugar that little is gained over sticking to HTML with classic Javascript handlers sprinkled in. In which case it's better to go with htmx and stay as declarative as possible. I tried to keep this brief, but I could blabber on about it forever hah!
snvzz 3y ago
>poison pills Unless explained, it sounds like FUD to me.
MisterTea 3y ago
We need operating systems designed to make the resources easily accessible across a network. What we are running today are mainframe operating systems where one computer does all the work for concurrent users. Using plan 9 has taught me that we are far from done designing computers and operating systems - we're trying to build the future on obsolete machines running obsolete operating systems.and it's not going well given all the ugly mutually incompatible nonsense taped and bolted on to hide their age.
frozenport 3y ago
This is Cerebras, and the cost is wasted compute and inaccessible price point

ftxbro 3y ago

> "Stuff like Julia/Clojure/MATLAB/Erlang/Go come close, but each have poison pills that make reaching the mainstream untenable." they have 'mojo' now but it might be proprietary like matlab or mathematica

snvzz 3y ago
Still waiting for them to explain what "poison pills" are there. These projects (edit: save MATLAB) are open source, they have the four freedoms.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  > "These projects are open source" I don't know about the rest of them but MATLAB isn't.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Right. I got that one mixed up with scilab, which is.

adgjlsfhk1 3y ago

What is the poison pill with Julia for you?

selimthegrim 3y ago
Also curious.
- zackmorris 3y ago
  Loosely, pretty much all languages today have some form of: mutability, async, special annotations needed for code that should run concurrently or on the GPU, manual memory management, friction around binding to other languages, ugly or unnecessary syntax, the list of poison pills is endless. I've barely learned portions of Julia, but it does have mutable variables. Once there's a mutable variable, the rest of the language is basically equivalent to transpiling an imperative language like Javascript. As in, there's little advantage over just using higher-order methods within an imperative language, because unexpected behavior can't be prevented, and code can't be statically analyzed beyond where the monad might change. Clojure uses Lisp's prefix syntax with () with no infix or postfix format available, forcing everyone from a C-style background or even a math background to manually convert their notation to prefix. MATLAB uses 1-indexed arrays, and I don't think that there's a config option to make them 0-indexed. Erlang is too esoteric along a number of design choices to ever be mainstream, although its Actor model is great. Go has trouble with exceptional behavior and doesn't isolate variables between threads, negating most of its usefulness for concurrency. Basically what I'm looking for is more like a spreadsheet in code, with no imperative behavior whatsoever. I believe that ClojureScript comes closest by executing functionally without side effects, then allowing imperative behavior while suspended, to get/send IO and then execute again. This most closely matches the way the real world works. Unfortunately languages like Haskell go to great lengths to hide the suspended side of things, making it somewhat of a write-only language like Perl (unreadable to outsiders) and too opaque for students to learn in a reasonable amount of time. The closest language I've encountered that got it almost right was PHP before version 5, when it passed everything by value via copy-on-write and avoided references. Most of the mental load of imperative programming is in reasoning about mutable state. Once classes passed by references arrived, it just became another variation of Javascript. With more syntax warts and inconsistent naming. But since it's conceptually good and mainly ugly in practice, it's still probably my favorite language so far. React and Redux go to great lengths to encapsulate mutable state, but end up with such ugly syntax or syntactic sugar that little is gained over sticking to HTML with classic Javascript handlers sprinkled in. In which case it's better to go with htmx and stay as declarative as possible. I tried to keep this brief, but I could blabber on about it forever hah!

snvzz 3y ago

>poison pills Unless explained, it sounds like FUD to me.

MisterTea 3y ago

We need operating systems designed to make the resources easily accessible across a network. What we are running today are mainframe operating systems where one computer does all the work for concurrent users. Using plan 9 has taught me that we are far from done designing computers and operating systems - we're trying to build the future on obsolete machines running obsolete operating systems.and it's not going well given all the ugly mutually incompatible nonsense taped and bolted on to hide their age.

frozenport 3y ago

This is Cerebras, and the cost is wasted compute and inaccessible price point