
Cilk Programing Language Wins Most Influential Award - iamelgringo
http://www.cilk.com/multicore-blog/bid/5607/Cilk-Wins-Most-Influential-PLDI-Paper-Award
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huhtenberg
Don't know about you, guys, but I find their website completely unappealing
and off-putting. The actual technical stuff _is_ quite interesting, but their
use of consumer-style marketing techniques does an excellent job of killing
any desire to learn about it. Trademarked buzzwords, a video of CEO discussing
"key values", a "blog" that reads like a marketing presentation, etc. It's
clear that they are trying to target suits rather than developers, and that's
quite unfortunate.

~~~
threadman
so let's say the team actually wants to target developers rather than suits -
what are the key things you'd change about the web site?

thanks in advance.

~~~
sgk284
It's easy: show me the code. Links to quick examples and tutorials that show
me what and how this language can do are amazingly useful. Pretty much you
want the primary focus to be on using your language, not selling it. You have
a navbar across the top; at first glance I know for 100% certainty only what
two of those links will do for me ("home" and "company").

In short, look at <http://python.org/> , <http://www.perl.org/> , and
<http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/> . Focus on enabling the developer to do
something useful as soon as possible. Focus on community, libraries, etc... If
you make one change and only one change to the site, add a link titled
"Getting started"... make it a wiki. See <http://www.erlang.org/starting.html>
for more inspiration. Right now it feels like the marketing department
designed the the cilk site.

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threadman
thank you.

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threadman
Does the following help? (A link to the alpha documentation.)
[http://www.cilk.com/resources-for-
multicoders/documentation-...](http://www.cilk.com/resources-for-
multicoders/documentation-and-examples/cilk-documentation)

We will post a bunch of code examples as well, but wanted to get something up
sooner than later.

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DaniFong
Incidentally, one of the languages it has influenced is Sun's Fortress, which
is growing in popularity. The 'work stealing' behavior pioneered by Clik
operates in the background, making implicit parallelization fast and
practical.

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ardit33
This is a quick look at its syntax.
<http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/intro.html>

It seems to be a mutlithreaded language based on C, with actually sane and
readable syntax. \---------- Ok nevermind. It just looks like C, with some
mutlithreaded facilities (spawn and sync). You still have to use malloc, and
all the little things that make C a slow to code language are still there.

~~~
threadman
Cilk++ is a considerable upgrade to MIT Cilk: support for C++ (rather than
just C), for Visual Studio (rather than just GCC), support for loops (rather
than just recursion). It's considerably more transparent to the developer.

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jws
I like the concept. SIGPLAN goes back to the papers from 10 years before and
decides which one was the most influential. I would say that is a prestigious
award indeed.

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babo
It's sad that they removed source code from they website, some time ago I've
downloaded it to play with but it's gone now. So much for licensing.

~~~
huhtenberg
There's <http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/cilk-5.4.6.tar.gz> and it appears
to have been last updated in Oct 2007.

~~~
babo
Hmmm... Am I blind or this link was not present at that time? Anyway, thanks
for your help!

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threadman
Here's the (alpha) documentation and code samples:
[http://www.cilk.com/resources-for-multicoders/for-
developers...](http://www.cilk.com/resources-for-multicoders/for-developers-
only/)

