[Beowulf] Stroustrup regarding multicore

[Perry E. Metzger]

"Lux, James P" <james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov> writes:
> I would say that you shouldn't be teaching the Scientist to
> code. You should be teaching them to write good requirements
> documents & test cases that someone who is skilled at coding can
> use.

I think it is very hard to do that.

It is not uncommon for me to get someone asking me a question of the
form "I need to do X, how can I do it", and while explaining to them
how to do X, further questioning slowly reveals that they really
should be doing Y. It just isn't possible for someone who doesn't
program as well as a decent programmer to put together good
requirements because they don't understand well enough what is
possible.

Over the years, I've worked in several very specialized fields. The
people who wrote the best software were both actual computer
scientists and actual domain experts. I admit that such people are
rare, and you usually can't get them, but that is the *ideal* case.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com