31–40 of 59 posts
Iann Barron was put in charge of our group for a while. I thought he was incredibly old and wise, and the only person I knew with a Lamborghini, that he drove to work every day. Now I'm six years older than he was then. Not wise, no Lamborghini...
In your defense, it was probably wise to skip on the Lamborghini.
There was an Apple Mac (sub-) team visit to Inmos in the UK, hosted by Ian Barron, sometime circa 1982 - 1983. Bob Belleville, the Mac team's director of engineering, led the trip. I remember Ian had a Jaguar with twin fuel tanks, but told the story of how he forgot to refill the first one when it was empty, so sometime he totally ran out of fuel. JG (John Giannandrea), later of Netscape, was at Inmos around then. (H…
FWIW, Go's channels were largely inspired by similar facilities in Occam.
I think Go's channels came largely from Tony Hoare's CSP, via a series of languages and experiences within the Bell Labs group that also produced Unix and Plan9. See Limbo, Alef, Newsqueak, and Squeak. Occam was also derived from CSP, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a direct ancestor to Go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)…
Atari actually built a Transputer workstation in 1989. Quite the curiosity when it was announced! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995277 Edit: Europe had a rather large Atari ST scene, since Macs were prohibitively expensive. So anything Atari got a lot of publicity. I remember reading a bunch of articles about the Transputer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorta like Actor model, but in hardware?
CSP. In hardware.
Exotic parallel architectures: you can build it, but will they come? Usually, no. You need some widely used case that partitions to match the hardware. GPUs and Bitcoin mining are the big successes so far. Machine learning has that property. Successes in this area tend to come from needing to solve a specific problem at scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Go's channels came largely from Tony Hoare's CSP, via a series of languages and experiences within the Bell Labs group that also produced Unix and Plan9. See Limbo, Alef, Newsqueak, and Squeak. Occam was also derived from CSP, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a direct ancestor to Go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)…
Hmm. Wasn't Alef done by Phil Winterbottom? I remember meeting him at a party in (iirc in Putney) and talking to him about Transputers. I can't remember if he was already familiar. It was a pretty good party. Anyway, based on that evidence I suspect there was a more direct derivation than from base CSP.
Alef was Phil Winterbottom, yes.
The Squeak paper (http://ordiecole.com/squeak/cardelli_squeak1985.pdf) was 1985, so let's assume the work was likely some time in 1984. That would follow the Blit terminal work (paper in 1982), which seems reasonable. Newsqueak, Alef, and Limbo followed in that order.
occam 1 was 1983, so it seems reasonable that Cardelli & Pike were aware of it, although it's not cited in the paper, so perhaps they weren't.
The Newsqueak TR is from 1994, although it seems likely the work was done earlier. The TR doesn't contain any formal citations, but the text describes the language: "syntax and basic semantics come from C, while the message-passing primitives come from CSP". I think it's a little odd that it doesn't mention occam, as I think it was widely known by the mid-80s as a successful use of the CSP concepts, and Newsqueak must have been somewhere in the range 1985-1994.
Alef is described as being derived from Newsqueak, but was released with Plan9 1st edition in 1992. Alef has "alt" and "par" constructs, which strongly suggest an occam influence.
That said, this talk (http://go-lang.cat-v.org/talks/slides/emerging-languages-cam...) from Rob Pike identifies occam (and Erlang) as a distinct evolutionary branch from CSP.
I guess we'd need to ask to be sure. Party time in Putney?
The spiritual successor to the transputer is a company called XMOS[1], which has some of the same original people behind the transputer there. You now tend to have multiple cores (virtual and physical, each virtual core is handled by time-slicing in hardware, and physical cores are other instances of the same) on a single chip-carrier, more memory, and embedded hard-cores for ethernet/USB but the concepts are pretty…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorta like Actor model, but in hardware?
CSP. In hardware.
Atari actually built a Transputer workstation in 1989. Quite the curiosity when it was announced! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995277 Edit: Europe had a rather large Atari ST scene, since Macs were prohibitively expensive. So anything Atari got a lot of publicity. I remember reading a bunch of articles about the Transputer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeliOS https://github.com/axelmuhr/Helios-NG