The principle of sufficient reason: A guide to language design for parallel processing.

Authors:
Dennis P. Geller;Gerald M. Weinberg
Affiliations:
SUNY at Binghamton;SUNY at Binghamton
Venue:
Proceedings of the conference on Programming languages and compilers for parallel and vector machines
Year:
1975

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Abstract

To a large extent, the design of languages for parallel processing machines seems to be a problem merely because of the historical precedence of von Neumann machines. We have grown up professionally in a serial computing environment, so that many of the habits we have acquired are related to that seriality and yet are so deeply ingrained thay we do not recognize seriality as the reason for doing them. Instead they seem like 'natural' laws, sometimes so 'natural' that we don't even notice their existence. In many cases then, we can arrive at the proper design of languages for parallel processing simply by forgetting what we 'know' about programming languages — but forgetting is not an easy thing to do without specific guidelines. One such guideline is the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which states: “parallel is more natural than serial, unless proved otherwise.”