[Edu-sig] Apropos "crunchy"...

[kirby urner]

I noted Nat's use of "crunchy" during the keynotes, found other instances,
of "crunchy" used as an attribute of talks, presentations.

A "crunchy talk" has more technical content, as typified by the keynote on
doing parallel processing in Haskell (what Parrot is waiting for?).

Actually it was about transactional memory, inspired by database folk
(like me!) and their ACID.  Atomic tasks with all-or-nothing commit
(rollback
if blocked) plus "else choose" capabilities, makes for intelligent parallel
programming, the next big challenge for many programmers.

Speaking of which, it seems clear to me that C++ ain't goin' anywhere
any time soon.  Intel's preferred solution for parallel processing is a new
C++ compiler with templates adapted to multi-tasking.

This won't be your grandfather's supercomputing though.  The extra CPU
horses may get used for rather "mundane" background tasks, such as font
smoothing.

I want to hear the bed time story that goes with "mommy, why isn't there
a C++ Python offering?"  From C to Java to C#... to Python itself.

Aren't we missing something in that loop?

Python in Haskell?

Not what I was thinking.

And for my next item on this crunchy diet, it's time to upload a composition

(a picture) of this robot penguin I first saw in demo mode at Europython,
purchased on sale at OSCON, from a French-English speaking geek grrrl
with a wacky keyboard (OK, wacky for *me*, artificially slowed by QWERTY
that I am as a writer).

More re Crunchy the Penguin in my blog:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2007/07/tux-is-alive.html

Kirby
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