Problem solving environments

The author discusses a few issues regarding programming tools and their interaction. In parallel programming environments the target machine is parallel, and at least some of the tools deal with parallelism by making possible its expression (e.g. a computer for a parallel programming language or a parallelizing compiler). The author discusses the more general concept of problem-solving environments because he believes that in the future, and at least for some applications, the users of these environments will not be programmers or at least will not have to write any programs. Therefore, much of the interaction with the system will be a description of the problem to be solved and not a description of the solution method