[petsc-dev] IMP prototype

[Jed Brown]

Victor Eijkhout <eijkhout at tacc.utexas.edu> writes:

> On Jan 2, 2014, at 10:03 AM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>> only for
>
> Look, it's a demonstration prototype. The shift syntax handles one
> case. For other cases you need a different syntax or extend the
> current.

Then the proposal is for something else.  The distinguishing feature of
successful programming abstractions is never one of making easy things
pretty.  There are many ways to do that, just as there are many ways to
solve a homogeneous Laplacian.  A successful abstraction needs to make
hard things possible.  As stated earlier, my principle reservation with
IMP is that adding another layer of callbacks has a long track record of
being more difficult to reason about, and I'm far from convinced that it
makes the model more expressive.  The syntax for describing
distributions is a distraction (syntax usually is), but the semantics
matter.  Two-sided descriptions are a usability problem, but a
performance benefit.  If IMP turns out not to be suitable for a
particular use case, transforming from callback-driven to non-callback
is a nontrivial refactoring, as is going the other direction.  That's
not good because it increases the overhead of incremental adoption.

I find simple demonstrations as unconvincing as most patents.  99% of
the work remains in extending the idea into something practical.  It may
or may not pan out, but we can't say anything from the simple
demonstration alone.
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