<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On 22/02/2006, at 2:48 AM, Luke Gorrie wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Daniel Luna <<A href="mailto:daniel@erlang-consulting.com">daniel@erlang-consulting.com</A>> writes:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">"At [insert mailing list THEY sent to] there are probably a lot of</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[insert programming language] programmers, so these figures cannot be</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">taken too seriously."</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I can sympathise with the surveyors. They seem to be interested in</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">parallel programming as in "using lots of hardware in parallel to</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">solve a problem" like SETI, CGI rendering farms, etc. I bet they got a</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">lot of responses from Erlang people writing internet servers & telecom</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">systems which are another kettle of fish entirely.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I don't think they did a very good job of spelling out what</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">applications they were interested in though.</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV>You touch on two reasons why this paper was a waste of time. </DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The choice of forums to advertise the survey predicted the outcome.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Newgroups:</DIV><DIV>comp.parallel : a moderated FAQ and RFP newsgroup supporting the other two c.p.* groups.</DIV><DIV>comp.parallel.mpi : a C/C++/Fortran library for building distributed applications in C/C++/Fortran.</DIV><DIV>comp.parallel.pvm: a C/C++/Fortran library for building distributed applications in C/C++/Fortran.</DIV><DIV>comp.sys.super: another FAQ/RFP newsgroup.</DIV><DIV>aus.computers.parallel: There have been exactly 8 posts since your survey announcement in Oct (6 were spam)! a dead-group.</DIV><DIV>comp.programming.threads: an active group discussing the use of threads in C/C++ especially pthreads. If you doubt me, consider that the past 20 threads included 115 posts, of these 91 were exclusively C/C++/pthreads focused, 11 were lower level that language, 3 were spam, 2 were misposts and only 8 were remotely generic - none of which mentioned any language except C/C++.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Mailing Lists:</DIV><DIV>beowulf - good choice, but heavily dominated by MPI/PVM based applications.</DIV><DIV>mpi - C/C++/Fortran</DIV><DIV>pvm - C/C++/Fortran</DIV><DIV>OpenMP x2 - C/C++/Fortran</DIV><DIV>BSP - (from the website) "BSPlib can be used with C, C++, or Fortran."</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>I don't know anything about the forums,</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Slashdot - good choice.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Note that despite the survey's claim to survey 'parallel programmers', and its stated desire to test the claim "Java threads is growing strong", the survey was restricted to users of C, C++, and Fortran. It did not in any meaning way survey 'parallel programmers', or make any attempt to assess the use of Java in this field.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>So the paper's results should have been summarised as</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>"If we ask C/C++/Fortran programmers what language they use they predominately answer C/C++/Fortran"</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Instead you state:</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>"<FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="2"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;">Obviously the hype around Java has managed to make the language known to</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="2"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;"> </SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="2"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;">many programmers, but has not convinced too many of them to actually use it for parallel</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="2"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;"> </SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="2"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;">programming."</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times" size="2"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10px;"></SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>A statement that is simply not supported by the methodology; the closest we might legitimately come from these results is:</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>"Of those programmers still using C, C++, or Fortran parallel programming technologies, very few use Java for their parallel programming."</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Which again is hardly earth-shattering news.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The second reason is that that paper fails on a more fundamental level. It completely fails to define 'parallel programming', or to provide any background to identify the nature and constituents of 'the community' cited in the introduction. It is this failure of definition that causes a problem when the paper hand-waves away the inconvenient response rate from the erlang community. The erlang responses are not a problem in themselves, rather they highlight the intrinsic bias shown in the survey sample. A truly representative survey would have identified a community of users who write parallel programs, and have targeted them with solicitations</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Off the top of my head the following all make extensive use of parallel programming:</DIV><DIV>Chemists</DIV><DIV>Physicists</DIV><DIV>Biotech</DIV><DIV>Computational Mathematicians </DIV><DIV>Web application developers</DIV><DIV>Telecom Switch developers :)</DIV><DIV>Embedded system developers (in my experience mostly C++ using pthreads or roll-your-own coroutine/user-level-thread libraries)</DIV><DIV>Research Engineers (especially Mechanical)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Almost none of these were surveyed except those few that both use MPI/PVM/OpenMP and follow the associated newsgroup/mailing-list.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>This is appalling research, I am interested in knowing which journal accepted this paper so I know which journal I can avoid because any peer-review that passes this tautological waste of effort is not peer-reviewed in any meaningful sense of the phrase.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Andrae Muys</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></BODY></HTML>