Quantum Programming Paradigms and Description Languages

This article offers perspective on quantum computing programming languages, as well as their emerging runtimes and algorithmic modalities. With the scientific high-performance computing (HPC) community as a target audience, we describe the current state of the art in the field, and outline programming paradigms for scientific workflows. One take-home message is that there is significant work required to first refine the notion of the quantum processing unit in order to integrate in the HPC environments. Programming for today’s quantum computers is making significant strides toward modern HPC-compatible workflows, but key challenges still face the field.