Re: Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote & The Programmer's Apprentice

[Steve Dekorte <address@hidden>]

On Monday, March 31, 2003, at 12:50 PM, Eli Collins wrote:
> Anyone have more ideas about what hardware makers could do to make 
> chips
> more useful from the PL POV? Any relevant lessons learned from Lisp
> machines?

It seems like a problem that needs to be address from both sides of the 
software/hardware fence. Right now we seem to have hardware folks 
trying extract parallelism out of sequential instruction streams and 
language folks trying to write software that runs fast on sequential 
processors. Both sides are assuming that one or more register or stack 
based CPUs are the only way to compute. Perhaps it's time to drop these 
assumptions and start from scratch. In other words, how would we design 
an ideal hw/sw to work together to make the best use of what can be 
done with modern chip manufacturing? Are CPUs hooked by a bus to RAM 
really the optimal solution? Are languages that lack explicit 
parallelism really appropriate?

Cheers,
Steve
Io, a small language: http://www.iolanguage.com/