[plt-scheme] Scheme productivity data point

On Nov 8, 2009, at 16:28, Matthias Felleisen wrote:

> Here is a similar story from a scientific computation group at Cornell, working Boeing. (Zippel is my source.)
> 
> They developed a Lisp-based framework for transforming continuous mathematics for wings into discrete and then into Fortran programs. They reduced the development time for Cray Fortran programs from a year to a month. Then they ran the program, which took another month (and a bit less). Then they had the results and could throw away the program. Sounds like a winner? Sadly a month of Cray time was more expensive in 1992 than 11 month of Fortran programmer time. They had lost -- Matthias

Now we programmers are cheaper still, and our tools are vastly better.  Supercomputers are probably not cheaper, but now we can use lots of cheap machines.  I wonder if they would win if the computation could be distributed, and if Amazon cloud will let folks rent a non-trivial collection of machines.  Scheme/Lisp could help make intelligent choices about how to divide and conquer, and could craft the distributed code.