GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?

1) Amdahl's law means it's not useful to have hundreds of cores for general purpose computing. There's not that much parallel work to do in typical applications. Increasing the proportion of work that's parallelizable for a given application pays dividends when you have more cores - that's why Servo is so exciting. In some cases, picking an O(n2) algorithm that's easy to parallelize will be faster than a less parallizable O(nlog(n)) algorithm - this is true for problems like Single-Source Shortest Paths (SSSP).

2) Shared resources (in-memory mutable data, hardware devices) mean the ratio of contention to CPU work goes up when you have more cores.

3) Cores on a single die need to share the same constraints - thermal limits and transistor count. So you're best off having enough powerful cores to get you to a sweet spot of single-core performance vs multi-core parallelism.

4) It's hard to provide a performant and useful many-core machine model. Cache coherence makes it easier to program a many-core machine, but limits performance. Without it, you're stuck with distributed systems-style problems.

I agree on all points, just trying to look at it from the other party’s point of view. But yeah, the situation with this sort of stuff is a pain.

There should be a high-prestige “journal of READMEs and User Handbooks,” haha.

Read a lot of this kind of post. Years ago I recall someone bleating for 8 cores when 1 or 2 was the norm. Now you want 256. Next generation will ask for thousands. All for nothing because you have no idea what to do with it except give the handwaviest justifications. A computer's a tool to do an actual job. You can and probably do have more computing power on your desktop than all the world's supercomputers put together from the 1970's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_X-MP

   Price US$7.9 million in 1977 (equivalent to $38.2 million in 2022)
   Weight 5.5 tons (Cray-1A)
   Power 115 kW @ 208 V 400 Hz[1]
   CPU 64-bit processor @ 80 MHz[1]
   Memory 8.39 Megabytes (up to 1 048 576 words)[1]
   Storage 303 Megabytes (DD19 Unit)[1]
   FLOPS 160 MFLOPS

In 2070 it still won't be enough for you. It never will be enough.

Perl6/Raku is my personal choice (when I can).

Python to me, is too far away from shell/unix. It is a programming language for writing applications. For the use case of writing shell scripts but in a more powerful language, perl is still the king here (or it should be. Sadly it doesn't appear to be the case. No one is using it except for die hard gray beards.)

Raku is a modern (still a big) language with kitchen sink. Again doesn't appear to be much uptake.

sure, but the other guy wants me to submit a picture in a funny hat, not a citation. and the third guy wants me to add some additional legal provisions and disclaimers to the GPL license.

you need a more generalized --clickwrap-consent parameter really. One that just says "whatever it is, I accept and I'll do it".

And that's exactly the thing GPL was supposedly founded to get away from. Restrictions on user freedoms. Especially violations so routine and tedious that we open-palm-slam "accept" without reading them.

You could absolutely write this to not look like a clickwrap agreement and lean on users. "please cite me, I'm an academic and impact matters" in the manfile or --help is not something anyone would ever get upset about or probably even patch to remove.

The only reason it's OK is because basically everyone knows it's not enforceable because of the severability part of the GPL. But it's blatantly designed to look like a serious and enforceable notice to users who don't know that, and require affirmative action from the user to "consent" and bypass the screen. And clickwrap agreements of this type are generally enforceable if there is not something like the GPL that allows you to ignore it.

like I flatly do not get why this is even debatable or questionable, the dude is trying to pull a fast one on users with a scary-sounding legal notice that implies that you need to accept this clickwrap agreement. and it's not entirely clear that he cannot actually burden you with this in all jurisdictions, since it's an agreement between you and the author that exists outside the actual source code/distribution. You can end up paying for free stuff in lots of places in life, if you're not aware about what "should" be free, and those agreements stand and are enforceable even though the thing was supposed to be free. You agreed to it. You don't have to, the GPL says that, you can edit the software to remove it without consenting, but you did accept it.

Letting the camel's nose under the tent on clickwrap agreements on GPL'd software is such an incredibly bad idea legally and morally, and this dude has been an utter dick about anyone who questions that. Sure, "he's willing to do it and nobody else is stepping up" but on the other hand he's also going off and attacking other maintainers doing their jobs, too. But that's not Stallman's problem I guess. That's another problem that only works with N=1 jerk, if that was normalized we'd have a problem.

I do not get why this guy is getting this special blessing or dispensation from FSF. Like it's not just that he's a random weirdo releasing under GPL and then trying to add additional terms (lol get stuffed), this is all occurring with the FSF's blessing, Stallman's signoff, and in the GNU distribution. Official GNU clickwrap license I guess.

At the end of the day - if the guy can't be satisfied with a polite request in the manfile, wow that sucks. But the GPL isn't about you, it's about the end user. There are explicitly licenses like BSD that require acknowledgement if that's your thing!