[clean-list] Clean, applied domain, goals(benefits), means, and investment

[Khamenia, Valery]

Hello Marco and fans of Clean,

Marco wrote:

> This does not mean that it is technically impossible to build 
> hardware that would perform faster graph rewriting than any Pentium 
> or PowerPC today. 

nice words.

> The academic research groups simply do not have the resources.

why should anybody bring any resources if there is no language capable 
of making explicit mass parallelism? There should be clear goal and means 
to reach this goal to obtain resources from investors.

There are key questions: 

what are...

1. ... domain for typical software written in Clean?

2. ... goals (benefits) to be achieved using clean? 
(e.g. we could have better <whatever> using Clean)

3. ... means? Or why could we have it exactly with help of Clean?

4.  languages-competitors? (what are the languages competing in the same 
     domain and pursuing the same goals?)

If clean pretends to be more then just educational language (why not?) those

questions should be answered.

I see a good reason and abilities to conquer this game setting up the most 
interesting kernel for Clean. I speak about an implicit parallelism. 
Then it is quite easy to answer the questions above and make the picture 
clear for investors.

> So what if it slows down Clean by 10 percent?

One could implement a simple database several times faster in C/C++ then 
in mainstream database-oriented languages. And who denies database 
languages because of it? Just imaging that Clean could became the 
only one language (even being 20% slower as it might be) but capable 
of making mass parallelism.

Clean with its implicit parallelism might become the only (or the very
first) 
motivation for a new generation of hardware (however that's for other 
topic/thread/discussion)

> The reality of today is that the Intel platform has become the main 
> platform for Clean. 

And? Clean already has a very good performance. 
What do you imply here? Do you want to compete C/C++ or ?..

> I do not see how one can see forking implemented 
> in Clean without discussing the Intel hardware.

sure. lets fork a topic then: "Forking on Intel" :)

> You could, but who is going to give this new machine to you? 

with current goals and means? -- probably no one.

> It is more likely that the rest of the world is going to say 
> "see, these functional languages will never be efficient enough".

Why should functional languages play smb. else's games?
However this is easier to discuss after 4 key questions above 
become answered.

> Apart from that, people probably want a machine that can run 
> different kinds of languages well.

What's the problem with Clean here? It is already quite good on our 
classical machines.

> Or you could start without parallellism and let the programmer 
> introduce some. This is what {P} and {I} were about.

maybe.

best regards,
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Valery A.Khamenya
Bioinformatics Department
BioVisioN AG, Hannover