Why Data Structures Matter: left, right folds, btrees | Hacker News Reader

Why Data Structures Matter: left, right folds, btrees

joelneely.wordpress.com

149 pointsgtani7 comments

Guy Steele's talk: How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Thinking-Parallel-Program...

More Guy Steele, more on topic. It's a much more in-depth investigation of the topic of this article:

This talk is the most interesting material I've seen in years. I first saw it some time ago and it has stayed on my mind. I believe Steele is entirely on the right track.

That's the talk I was looking for, thanks!

I was impressed by the clarity of that talk. It makes one point. Sequential programs look like

  do rest = 
    do first one
    do rest,

but parallel programs look like

  do half =
    do one half
    do other half.

The examples are interesting, too.

I highly value "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley in this regard. He proposes a problem and then solves it in naive way followed by the right way/ways. I realized the importance of choosing correct data structure for a particular problem from that book.

In the same vein, albeit more on the implementation-side, there was a nice talk by David Liebke at last Clojure Conj: http://blip.tv/file/4645227

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