I recently watched an interesting talk by Guy L. Steele Jr. showing how different problem solving approaches can allow or prevent a parallel implementation. Vocabulary The vocabulary you have to discuss solutions and algorithms affects how you approach new problems. Guy Steele showed that everyone in his audience already understood ideas for iterative, sequential solutions (loops, lists, accumulators), but only a minority already understood ideas for potentially parallelizable solutions (parallel prefix). Like design patterns for object-oriented programming and monads for functional programming a higher-order vocabulary of parallel programming idioms would help us both communicate with each other and helps us…