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Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

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Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#31

Post by fmajid »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #24
ketzu wrote: post #16

This was quite interesting to look through! Perl 5.8.0 is over 20 years old ( https://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/2002/07/18/580ann/ ) while centOS 3.9 was released in 2007! At the same time it seems not-that-old and ancient. My personal anecdote with gnu parallel was running into it while working in academia. It worked well and saved me some time, but I felt that it was unreasonable of a tool to ask for a citation to pa…

Yep, that's the great thing about perl... take a 20 year old script and it still works today. In comparison, if they used python, they'd be using python 2.2.

That's basically a side-effect of Perl being a dead language, frozen because Perl 6 will never happen. It's surprisingly hard to eradicate, however.

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#33

Post by justeleblanc »

hexane360 wrote: post #28
RhysU wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is "nonsense" because...? A) You don't understand. Please read the "Citation notice" section in the article. B) You understand but don't use GNU Parallel. C) You understand and use GNU Parallel in a non-academic setting and find the hassle of supplying --no-notice to be onerous vs the effort to write/maintain your own tool. D) You understand and use GNU Parallel in an academic setting and have cited Ole or plan to…

It's nonsense because the standard in academic settings is to cite works which contribute scientifically to the current work, not merely utilities. If I publish a paper on a command line tool for parallel processing, inspired by features from GNU parallel, I would cite GNU parallel. But if I'm doing (for instance) computational biology work, I'm not going to cite: - the Linux kernel - Python - Matlab - GNU parallel -…

Also, in what world is OSS financed by citations (which is stated as fact in the manpage)? The whole thing is just bizarre. Do I have to cite the manufacturer of my desk because I wrote my paper there?

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#34

Post by VyseofArcadia »

fmajid wrote: post #31
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, that's the great thing about perl... take a 20 year old script and it still works today. In comparison, if they used python, they'd be using python 2.2.

That's basically a side-effect of Perl being a dead language, frozen because Perl 6 will never happen. It's surprisingly hard to eradicate, however.

There's value in stability, though.

Maybe it's not dead. Maybe it's just finished. Does everything need to keep changing? Change isn't always improvement, and even if it is, if you have to maintain backwards compatibility, sometimes the conceptual load of having to keep the old ways and the new ways in your head all the time isn't worth it.

Maybe we should start letting things just be finished.

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#35

Post by bloopernova »

psychphysic wrote: post #8
docandrew wrote: post #2

I couldn’t make heads or tails of what this would be useful for from the OP (maybe it’s something I should already have known), but this from the official site was pretty helpful: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/parallel_cheat.pdf

That cheat sheet is super enlightening! But quite useless as it'll print poorly and is overall a waste of resources to have that lovely beach scene in the background.

I was able to remove the background using LibreOffice to open the PDF.

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#36

Post by chungy »

RhysU wrote: post #19
chungy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully both Debian and Arch patch out the citation nonsense.

It is "nonsense" because...? A) You don't understand. Please read the "Citation notice" section in the article. B) You understand but don't use GNU Parallel. C) You understand and use GNU Parallel in a non-academic setting and find the hassle of supplying --no-notice to be onerous vs the effort to write/maintain your own tool. D) You understand and use GNU Parallel in an academic setting and have cited Ole or plan to…

How about

E) I understand and use GNU Parallel and also completely disagree with the author's insistence that citing tools is appropriate.

Even in your second link, almost everything listed are papers about Parallel itself. If I was writing about Parallel, I'd be fine with citing it. If instead it's the means to another end, I wouldn't.

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#37

Post by andrewshadura »

InfamousRece wrote: post #18
anthk wrote: post #14

Parallel, vidir to edit directories with nvi/vim, moreutils, detox to scrap out any non-typeable char... These are a must have today.

moreutils have its own parallel utility that I actually prefer to Gnu parallel.

There's also paexec

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#38

Post by chungy »

fmajid wrote: post #31
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, that's the great thing about perl... take a 20 year old script and it still works today. In comparison, if they used python, they'd be using python 2.2.

That's basically a side-effect of Perl being a dead language, frozen because Perl 6 will never happen. It's surprisingly hard to eradicate, however.

Perl isn't dead, not by a long shot. Perl 6 happened too, and because compatibility was never even really a thought, renamed to Raku instead. There's been talks for a few years of finally bumping Perl's major version in order to change the defaults.

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#39

Post by RhysU »

hexane360 wrote: post #28
RhysU wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is "nonsense" because...? A) You don't understand. Please read the "Citation notice" section in the article. B) You understand but don't use GNU Parallel. C) You understand and use GNU Parallel in a non-academic setting and find the hassle of supplying --no-notice to be onerous vs the effort to write/maintain your own tool. D) You understand and use GNU Parallel in an academic setting and have cited Ole or plan to…

It's nonsense because the standard in academic settings is to cite works which contribute scientifically to the current work, not merely utilities. If I publish a paper on a command line tool for parallel processing, inspired by features from GNU parallel, I would cite GNU parallel. But if I'm doing (for instance) computational biology work, I'm not going to cite: - the Linux kernel - Python - Matlab - GNU parallel -…

> It's nonsense because the standard in academic settings is to cite works which contribute scientifically to the current work, not merely utilities.

Whether or not it's standard is irrelevant. Ole asked you to cite him if you use it. So, if you publish academically, either don't use it or cite him. If not using GNU Parallel hinders your science then the tool must be material to your work flows.

For comparison, how many dumb citations do people add to their papers that point to marginally relevant work coming out of the same research center or academic lineage? Those aren't scientifically relevant but they are standard. Let's not pretend the academy is full of citation purists.

Re: Design of GNU Parallel (2015)

#40

Post by codetrotter »

rockwotj wrote: post #25

I recently used parallel to write a 1TB data file for testing using all cores seq 0 10000 | parallel dd if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/foo/input bs=10M count=10 seek={}0

Was it noticeably different from

    dd if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/foo/input bs=10M count=100000
in the amount of time that it took?
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