I never can get enough stories about Richard Feynman. I thought I'd heard them all, but somehow I missed this one. It's well written and captures many of the things he worked on later in his life; not to mention it's a really cool article about the beginnings of a rather ambitious project to make a parallel computer in the early 1980s.
"Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic in which he wrote the program and then simulated it by hand to estimate how fast it would run on the Connection Machine."
I don't think so. He didn't invent a new language, but extended an existing one. And I simulate what a program does in my head all the time when debugging (including multithreaded stuff, but I agree that's hard).
This article was from the Physics Today memorial issue on Feynman iirc. When I read it at the time, I seem to remember that it was also the weakest article in that issue. (It was before Thinking Machines crashed and burned.)
I took Alan Edelman's 18.337 class (Parallel Supercomputing) at MIT a few years ago, and on the first day he brought in some boards that had been used in the original Connection Machine - it was like looking into a piece of living history to see circuits that had been influenced by Feynman. Fantastic article!
"""So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us."""
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] thread"Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic in which he wrote the program and then simulated it by hand to estimate how fast it would run on the Connection Machine."
That's a much more impressive skill than just learning another language.
What a gift of a human.