At 02:49 PM 5/6/99 , Chip Morningstar wrote:
Nothing deep. Just a few casual conversations.
>...
I quite agree with this last paragraph. The difference between Joule & E is
However, the Internet as a whole is a much bigger laboratory than Beowulf
clusters, and there's a lot more payoff for a lot more people if they can
target their distributed app development at the Open Internet. With E, this
A good example is MarcS' upcoming Secureit-EChat -- a truly secure 2-person
distributed chat program in 5 pages of E code, about 3 of which are user
interface. Watch
>Bill Frantz and I were chatting over lunch yesterday and it occurred to me to
>wonder if you have investigated/looked into/heard of the community of folks
>doing parallel computation with what they call Beowulf clustering (see, for
>example, www.beowulf.org).
>Second, I'm thinking about the model presented in _Crossing The Chasm_.
Perhaps
>we should think about more consciously positioning E as the Perl or Visual
>Basic of distributed systems: its job is not to run fast, its job
>unsophisticated programmers of average competence to quickly and fairly easily
>whip together boring but valuable small-to-medium sized (distributed)
>applications. Being the hardcore hacker early adopter types that we are, we
>*like* to think of what we are doing here as edge-of-the-art stuff, but it may
>be more advantageous to posture as the second wave of technology, making this
>class of systems accessible to the mainstream.
Of course, if a Beowulf-based opportunity to advance the project presented itself, great!
Cheers, --MarkM