Lambda the Ultimate

A psychologist looks at Programming Languages:

Programming languages are not only useful to command computers, they also increasingly are a medium for human communication. I will use the framework of distributed cognition to discuss how knowledge is shared in a team of programmers and to show that computer code plays an important role in it. The resulting model of how programmers comprehend code suggests that common grounds play an important role in it. I propose two hypotheses concerning the means used by programmers to refer to common grounds from within their code. The hypotheses imply that modern languages, such as Scala, offer advantages as human communication mediums. I describe an experiment, using an eye-tracking device, that measures the performance of code comprehension. The hypotheses are tested by varying the degree of reference to common grounds.

Computer Code as a Medium for Human Communication: Are Programming Languages Improving?

Dr. Victor Pankratius is scheduled to give a talk this Friday at UT Austin entitled, "Transactional Memory versus Locks - A Comparative Case Study". The presentation is here, a technical report is forthcoming.

The study is a side-by-side comparison of Transactional Memory with traditional multi-thread programming; general features of the study are:

• 12 students, apparently not experienced with multi-threaded programming, divided into six teams: three using Pthreads, three using Pthreads and Intel's STM C compiler.
• All teams worked on the same project, a parallel desktop search engine. Competition was for best performance.
• TM "improve[s] quality of parallel code [as judged by Dr. Pankratius and the STM compiler team at Intel], reduce[s] implementation and debugging effort, and provide[s] acceptable performance".
• "If subjects are inexperienced, then TM does not help them either. Parallel programming remains difficult."

If anyone knows more, or can go to the presentation, I would like to hear more.

(I am posting his to the forum since I cannot find a detailed description other than the presentation.)