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"Guy L. Steele Jr. believes that it should not be the programmer’s job to think about parallelism, but languages should provide ways to transparently run tasks in parallel."

And who makes the languages? Programmers!

I get what he's trying to say... He's trying to say that someone should stop and make it easy for the rest of us to do parallel programming.

And I think someone will eventually do just that. But as usual, I don't think someone writing a blog post about it is going to push someone into it. Either they have the drive to do it, or they don't. "Somebody else should do something about this!" never works.



Note that Guy Steele is working on the language Fortress, which (among other things) aims to make parallelism much easier. He's definitely not trying to push this off on someone else.


Even in C++ it's pretty trivial to parallelize a loop with openMP.

The compiler could do it automatically but it's only a single line preprocessor directive.


Is it? Adding the directive is easy, but verifying that it does not change program semantics can be far from easy.

A parallelizing compiler must do the latter before doing the former.




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