Language Discussions
There have been various articles on the merits of different programming languages, both parallel and sequential, during the last week (notice how elegantly I have avoided the term language wars 😉 ):
- Joel has written about which (sequential) programming language to use for web-programming. He primarily compares Java and .NET, along with a little bit of PHP and Python, but also draws some general conclusions, which I mostly agree with (e.g. do not waste too much of your time arguing about languages, but instead use the one you know best – please note the emphasis added by me).
- At scalability.org there is a short comparison between OpenMP, MPI and some other parallel programming systems.
- An article at Clustermonkey points to a summary of a discussion on the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing mailing list. The question discussed there is, why nobody is using any of the new parallel programming systems. Some quite interesting comments are to be found there.
I don’t feel like commenting on all of these articles and getting involved into a language war, so I will leave them uncommented for now. Maybe at some later time…